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Open research tool

Archive sources

Subdex holds no data of its own. Every record you see was returned by one of the independent archives below.

Subdex is not Reddit and is not affiliated with Reddit. Reddit trademarks belong to their owners.

Arctic Shift

An open-source archive of historical Reddit posts and comments, run by Arthur Heitmann. It offers bulk data dumps, a public API and a web search interface, with no key and no registration. Subdex uses the API.

  • Broad historical coverage of posts and comments.
  • Not a real-time mirror. The archive lags the live site, so recent activity may be missing.
  • Scores and comment counts are unreliable for roughly the first 36 hours after posting, because records are captured at creation and updated later.
  • No uptime or performance guarantee. It is a free service run by one person.

Because it is free and volunteer-run, Subdex caps itself at two concurrent requests and backs off when asked to. There is no proxy rotation and no way to raise that ceiling from the interface.

PullPush

A second independent Reddit archive and search service, also free and unauthenticated. Its coverage, freshness and query behaviour differ from Arctic Shift, which is precisely why having both is useful.

  • Separate collection and retention from Arctic Shift.
  • Different query parameters, so results are not always directly comparable.
  • Availability in a browser-only application depends on the service permitting cross-origin requests. Where it does not, Subdex disables it rather than pretending it works.

Why two sources disagree

Two archives collecting the same site at different moments will not agree. One may hold a post the other missed. One may have captured a comment before it was edited. Scores diverge because they were sampled at different times.

Subdex does not resolve those disagreements by picking a winner. Where providers return different values for the same record, both values are kept and the conflict is recorded, because the disagreement is itself information about archive coverage.

What this means for your research

  • Absence of a record is not evidence that something was never posted.
  • A score is a snapshot from the moment of capture, not a current figure.
  • Records marked deleted or removed reflect what the archive observed, not a check against Reddit today.
  • Verify anything consequential against the original source where it still exists.