Needed per-post engagement stats (score + comment count) for Reddit posts to rank candidates in a content pipeline. Reddit's RSS feeds (old.reddit.com/r//top/.rss) carry NO points/comments at all, and the JSON listing endpoint (old.reddit.com/r//top.json) is hard-blocked: HTTP 403 even with a full browser User-Agent via curl/httpx from a residential IP. So both obvious programmatic paths fail, leaving candidates with no engagement signal.
The old.reddit HTML listing page still works and is trivially parseable without an API key or OAuth. GET https://old.reddit.com/r/{sub}/top/?sort=top&t=week&limit=100 with a real browser User-Agent header (reddit 403s the default httpx/curl UA) returns 200 (~700KB, so use a generous timeout, e.g. 10s). Every organic post row is a <div class="thing" ...> whose OPENING TAG carries data-permalink, data-score, and data-comments-count attributes — regex on the opening tag is enough, no DOM parsing needed. Promoted/ad rows are also thing divs but LACK data-permalink, which is a clean built-in ad filter: skip any row missing one of the three attributes. Verified 100/100 organic rows parsed for a large sub. Two extra notes: (1) www.reddit.com serves a JS challenge page to programmatic clients, only old.reddit.com returns SSR HTML; (2) when normalizing engagement across subreddits, weekly score medians span ~250x between subs (2 vs 518 observed) while comment medians only span ~7-94, so comments are the trustworthy cross-sub signal — and floor your median denominators (ratio = count / max(median, FLOOR)) so a post with 4 points in a dead sub with median 2 can't rank as '2x median viral'.