I built my Spotify Exporter app based on a Reddit comment. It was fun, and I've gotten a lot of positive feedback and even a few KoFi donations from it. This past year, I've built several fun sites/apps and tools, but I've fallen into the classic developer trap of building something interesting... for nobody. (FriendlyLog, Diffuse, Spot the Synth, and a bunch of others that didn't make it to deployable)
Which is worthwhile for my own edification/education, but it was really cool building something that people actually use.
How to do that? The current standard advice for builders is to hang out where your target audience is and see what they need. But I don't have a ton of time to just sit around browsing Reddit. So I built a Reddit Keyword Monitor app that watches specific subreddits for posts that match a list of keywords, scores them for relevancy, and then posts a digest of the most relevant posts to a specified subreddit.
Everything is configurable from the Reddit UI. You can specify which subreddits to monitor, which keywords to look for, how to score relevancy, and where to post the digest.
Originally I planned to build this using the Reddit Api and then was going to integrate that with Notion. Devvit seemed like a weird fit for that, but my API application got denied, and Devvit turned out to be a really easy alternative. The Redis plugin was super easy to use, the app settings are handled for you, and deployment is really easy. The only weird part is finding the settings UI to configure env variables after deployment, but once you know where it is, it's not a big deal.
I ended up scrapping the Notion integration since Devvit makes a subreddit for the app when you deploy it, and it seemed like a waste to not use that space/those resources.
I was pleasantly surprised by Devvit. I have no idea whether this monitoring tool will yield useful results, and will definitely have to do some keyword tweaking (others' self-promotion often sneaks through, for example, which isn't what I'm looking for), but it's working really well and is a fun, low-stress way to see what people are asking for.
This project features:
- Configurable subreddit monitoring
- Keyword-based relevancy scoring
- Digest posting to a specified subreddit
- Redis-based deduplication
And was built with:
- Devvit/JavaScript/NodeJS
