Guides for working with platform data
What each platform's official tools can and cannot do, with their limits, and how to get the rest. Figures come from dated measurements, platform documentation or published prices; simulations are labelled as such.
Threads
What Meta's Threads API can and cannot export, and how to get the whole post history of any public account with view counts, as CSV or JSON.
The Threads API keyword search endpoint, its permission, its 2,200-query cap and what it returns, then how to search public posts without an approved app.
What changed in Reddit's API from 2023 to the end of public access in 2027, and the alternatives for posts and comments, with their limits and prices.
Export a Reddit thread with every reply, its parent and its depth, as CSV, JSON or compact Markdown for an LLM. PRAW code and a no-API-key alternative.
Google Trends
Is there an official Google Trends API? What happened to pytrends and its 429 errors, why curves differ between requests, and how to get stable data.
Why Google Trends goes weekly over long ranges and rescales every request, and two published methods for daily data and one scale for any number of terms.
AliExpress
What AliExpress's affiliate and dropshipping APIs return and require, what they leave out (stock, variants, reviews), and how to get product data without them.
Every variant (SKU) of an AliExpress product has its own price and stock, and the listed price is only the lowest. How to export them all to CSV, one row per variant.
YouTube
The YouTube Data API only downloads captions of videos you can edit. What youtube-transcript-api does, the language traps of YouTube captions, and how to get transcripts at scale.
Get the transcripts of a whole YouTube channel, newest first, in the language spoken in each video: one text file per video and a CSV index, then only the new videos.
Meta's Instagram API has no transcript and no captions for visitors. How to transcribe reels with yt-dlp and Whisper, the phantom phrases and false translations we measured, and the shortcut.
Get the transcripts of an Instagram account's latest reels: one text file and one SRT subtitle file per reel, an index in CSV, and reels without speech left out for free.
TikTok
TikTok's Display API has no transcript and its Research API's voice_to_text is for non-profit researchers. What yt-dlp gets from TikTok captions, three traps we measured, and how to get every video's text.
Get the transcripts of a TikTok account's latest videos, from TikTok's captions or AI speech-to-text: one text file and one SRT file per video, and an index in CSV.