What does a station change about the housing question?
A community analyst reading urbanplanning might want to compare transport proposals with housing concerns. Start with the relationship: does a retrieved text discuss reaching a station, building near it, or both? Subreddit Data provides access to an independent historical Reddit archive for this reading task. It is not a live feed or an official Reddit service. The useful outcome is a set of contextual examples with an explained selection, rather than a verdict on what all members want.
Try https://api.subredditdata.com/v1/search?q=transit&subreddit=urbanplanning&limit=3. q supplies the search text, subreddit keeps the task within urbanplanning and limit requests no more than three records. This is a demonstration request, not evidence that three suitable discussions exist. Read the response you actually receive before deciding which topics to compare. A question about a station, a network proposal and a quoted news item may need different local labels.
Choose the unit before adding a second topic
A post can introduce a proposal; a comment can answer one detail without repeating its context. Decide whether the worksheet compares posts, comments, or a deliberately mixed set. Use kind=post or kind=comment when that restriction suits the question, and keep it unchanged across the two topic searches. Otherwise a difference in the material could come from the record types you selected.
Build a worksheet in your own tools with a row for each query: community, search text, record kind, UTC dates, score threshold, page limit, retrieval time and outcome. Keep conditions fixed while changing the topic term for another view of the same community. This makes the difference in selection visible; it does not make the views representative, statistically equivalent or complete.
Keep a place for the station-area overlap
For each retained record, add a local topic note and the reason it belongs in that view. For example, a transit discussion may also concern housing around a station. Mark such overlap instead of counting it as two independent participants. Record an uncertain classification when the text or context is insufficient. These are analyst annotations; the API does not supply topic shares, sentiment scores, audience demographics or statistical findings.
Flat records are not assembled conversation trees. If parent_id or link_id is present, local grouping may help explain a reference, but it cannot ensure a complete thread or recover every missing parent. A worksheet can distinguish the original text, your interpretation and unavailable context. Keep that distinction when sharing a finding with people who have not read the underlying material.
Read the selection rules beside the examples
q searches title and text. For multiple analyzed words, AND matching requires the words within a matching field; it does not mean any one word is enough or require the words in both fields. A multiword query is not an exact-phrase guarantee. Note the exact wording in the worksheet so a narrower expression is not mistaken for less community interest. Different topic terms can match the same record and can miss alternative vocabulary.
Dates are YYYY-MM-DD in UTC, filtering created_utc. The to date includes the whole specified day, even when that day is today; it is not limited to the instant of your request. _doc order is not chronological, relevance or score order, and min_score is only a threshold. At most 100 records per request and 100 pages per query are available. Equal settings help document selection but do not prove equal archive coverage.
Decide what another page would add
After the small transit response, decide whether the next useful action is a housing query, another page, or a closer reading of the records already saved. One successful retrieval uses one credit even when empty; rereading a local file makes no new request. The key page handles access and funding, while the guide develops the two-row worksheet. Keep the final memo tied to the records actually inspected and list questions that the available context cannot answer.
