Reddit Simplified API

pre-requisites

• Composer - if you don't have it, you can download it right here.
• Node.JS - if you don;t have it, you can download it right here.

Installation procedures

• Either download or clone (git clone https://github.com/ereztdev/reddit-simplified-api.git) this repo into your webserver
• switch into the repo directory where you pulled the repo: cd reddit-simplified-api
• composer install to install Laravel dependencies
• npm install to install node.js dependencies
• npm run dev to transpile all frontend assets
• in your root dir (reddit-simplified-api), create a file named .env and copy the contents of .env.example into the newly created .env
• run the command php artisan key:generate
• either use your own web server (XAMPP/WAMPP/Whatev) or run php artisan serve, though not so recommended due to some issues with PHP ^7.3.1

A few points about this repo

• Reddit's API has some throttling issues with Reddit's non-OAuth API, I created a timeout of 8 seconds with an exception that will notify you about the timeout.
• Re statistics, it's a basic representation. The threshold for upvotes is x<100, and I use a volume weighted average to determine which part of the day would make more sense to post. The right way to execute this in a more thorough manner is gaining a large amount of observations and trying to create centroids that would look for clustering hours that have high upvotes. Also to take into consideration that there is a large amount of companies that offer Reddit bot services, for posts, likes and influence, you can find alot of those in /r/politics.

All the best, Erez