RedStalk 🕵️‍♀️

What is RedStalk?

Ever wondered what patterns lie hidden in public Reddit activity? RedStalk is a powerful, command-line tool designed for in-depth analysis of Reddit users based on their publicly available posts and comments.

It intelligently scrapes data, allows granular filtering, performs comprehensive statistical analysis, and leverages Google's Gemini AI for qualitative insights. Dive deep into user interests, communication styles, sentiment trends, and more. Perfect for researchers, data analysts, or anyone curious about online community dynamics.

Key Features

• Efficient Scraping: Smart incremental fetching only grabs new data, saving time and API calls.
• Powerful Filtering: Zero in on activity by date ranges or specific subreddits (inclusion/exclusion).
• Rich Statistical Reports: Get detailed Markdown reports covering activity timelines, subreddit engagement, content metrics, sentiment analysis (VADER), and more.
• AI-Powered Insights: Utilize Google Gemini with custom prompts for narrative summaries, personality profiling, topic analysis, and writing style assessment.
• User Comparison: Generate side-by-side statistical comparisons of two users.
• Background Monitoring: Keep tabs on a user and automatically update their data when new activity occurs.
• Multiple Outputs: Exports raw data (JSON), filtered data (CSV), and analysis reports (Markdown).
• Configurable & Flexible: Manage settings via config.json or command-line flags.

Installation

Get RedStalk running on your system in a few steps:

1. Prerequisites:

• Python 3.8+
• pip (Python package installer)
• git

2. Clone the Repository:

git clone https://github.com/sarthak-sidhant/redstalk.git
cd redstalk

3. Set Up Virtual Environment (Recommended):

# Create environment
python -m venv venv

# Activate it
# Windows:
venv\Scripts\activate
# macOS/Linux:
source venv/bin/activate

4. Create `requirements.txt` and Install Dependencies:

Create a file named requirements.txt in the redstalk directory and paste the following content inside it:

# Core stuff for scraping and files
requests>=2.25.0
rich>=10.0.0

# Optional: Install only if using these features

# Needed for AI features (--run-analysis, --summarize-stats, --generate-prompt)
google-generativeai>=0.3.0

# Needed for Statistical Analysis (--generate-stats, --compare-user)
vaderSentiment>=3.3.0
pandas>=1.2.0
# nltk is also used for stats (install separately if needed via pip install nltk)

# Optional: Progress bars for AI tokenization
tqdm>=4.60.0

Now, install the dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

(You might also need NLTK data for some stats: run python, then `import nltk; nltk.download('punkt'); nltk.download('vader_lexicon')`)

5. Configuration:

Edit the config.json file (create one if it doesn't exist). Crucially, set a unique user_agent including your Reddit username as required by Reddit API terms. Set your Google Gemini API key securely (environment variable GOOGLE_API_KEY is recommended).

You're ready to start analyzing! Check the full README on GitHub for detailed usage instructions and examples.