I'm currently between jobs, so in my boredom I built scraper that can bypass Reddits notoriously difficult to gain API.

I'm not a software dev or have any skills in the field nor have I worked in the field, I'm a mechanic who likes coding lol.

Its a simple python script that looks for anything you ask it. I used to find new or up-and-coming memes, I was planning to use that and funnel it's to a print on demand service which mocks up and auto uploads ready to buy clothing to a self built website for sale, once I built the script I couldn't be bothered to build the rest of the backend (ADHD is great lol)

it uses stealth ingestion that mimics Chromes TLS fingerprint then appends .json to old Reddit URLs which forces Reddit to hand over clean raw data, then finds metadata explicitly tagged as an image by Reddit by looking for file extensions in image format (jpeg, PNG ect)

Once the script has found a clean list of images it's calculates a viral score based momentum from upvotes, comments, engagement and rising posts.

On first run it takes the score and saves it to a JSON database, subsequent runs finds new content and cross-references old content on the JSON file and flags it if has risen over 15% from previous runs.

Just a simple project that works to a point but I'm too lazy to actually use it, besides I'm sure Reddit will find it one way or another and patch my loophole.

As I said I'm not a dev or a trained python powerhouse in the slightest. A pure greenhorn amateur.