Reddit brand narrative audit

Produce decision-ready research about a named brand or product. Keep each subreddit as an independent case study until its collection, classification, and interpretation are complete. Cross-community synthesis comes afterward.

Establish the study

Confirm the entity's identity from a primary source or ask if multiple entities could match. Record:

• Brand/product, official URL, launch or event being studied, and distinct aliases.
• A brand map: parent company, product names, regional subsidiaries, ticker symbols, and unrelated namesakes. Analyze those layers separately before attributing a product complaint or ticker opinion to the parent.
• Fixed start and end instants with a timezone. Use a half-open UTC interval [start, end) in all collection and calculations. If the user says “September 8–23,” convert that to September 8 00:00 through September 24 00:00 in the stated timezone.
• Whether the objective is launch reaction, ongoing reputation, a specific incident, competitive narrative, or another question.
• Any user-specified communities, geographies, and output format.

If the user asks for “all relevant subreddits,” discover a defensible candidate set through Reddit-wide search, named-community search, links to relevant news, and adjacent topics. Expand the set when posts reveal another active community. Define and report the searched universe; no method can prove that every Reddit post was discovered.

Collect one subreddit at a time

Use an available read-only Reddit source, including Reddit Scout when installed. For a fixed UTC interval, scripts/collect_arctic.py is a reusable Arctic Shift collector: