Reddit’s impending changes to its public API will have widespread impact on Redditors, including the death of beloved third-party clients. Independent subreddits may even go dark indefinitely, which marks the beginning of Reddit’s inevitable devolution as a platform. Reddit’s non-monetary value as a knowledge store is priceless, which is why concerns have been raised about access to users’ contributions. While users can export their data into a GDPR archive through Reddit, it allows only the plaintext of the comment, the subreddit name, the timestamp, and the number of awards.
A Reddit user has written a Python tool called reddit-user-to-sqlite that allows users to build an archive of all of their posts and comments. The database file generated can be used with Datasette, meaning each column can be sorted, and full-text search on comments and posts is possible. The tool also supports reading data from a GDPR archive that will continue working after the API shuts down.
https://xavd.id/blog/post/archive-your-reddit-data/