Prototype

Reddit Observer

What if…

we had a digital assistant who would constantly monitor reddit and inform us immediately about rising discussions on our published articles?

Problem

The web is constantly discussing, ranting and complaining about content. It is virtually impossible to keep an eye on the general dynamic of public discussions and manually checking in is very cumbersome.

Solution

We introduce an automated approach to stay informed about what users are discussing when referencing our content. On the example of Reddit, we implemented a Bot who observes all mentions of content, hosted on welt.de or bild.de. Via Slack the bot then notifies us about especially controversial and hot topics. Of course we can also ask the bot to send us a digest on the latest discussions.

Challenges

Having a bot observe Reddit can quickly escalate into massiv spam when he reports back everything that happens there. So we had to find a well balanced threshold of what we define worthy for reporting back. Configuring a Slack-bot which is able to push messages into our workspace was not that hard in particular but there are some pitfalls regarding permissions and race-conditions which we had to master first.