How to Find Someone's Reddit Comments by Username (2026)

If you want to find someone's Reddit comments by username — every reply they have written, not just the one you stumbled on — Reddit gives you more than most platforms do, and less than you probably need. Unlike TikTok or Instagram, Reddit ships a real public comment history: any account's replies sit on their profile under a Comments tab. But that tab has a hard ceiling, no search inside it, no date filter, and no way to save what you find. This guide covers four ways to pull up a user's comments, what each one can and cannot reach, and how to get the results into a spreadsheet when scrolling is not enough.

What "find someone's Reddit comments" usually means

Three very different jobs hide behind the same search:

• You want your own comment history — usually to find something you wrote months ago and cannot recall which thread it was in.
• You are vetting an account — a moderator checking whether an applicant has a history of rule-breaking, a hiring manager sanity-checking a technical claim, or a buyer confirming a seller in a swap subreddit is not a throwaway.
• You are researching a conversation — a brand tracking who keeps raising a complaint, or an academic sampling how a community discusses a topic over time.

The first two are satisfied by the native profile page. The third almost never is, because it needs the comments around the ones you found — context, replies, scores — and it needs them in a file you can sort. Methods 1 to 3 below find the comments. Method 4 is how you keep them.

Method 1: The user profile Comments tab (start here)

Reddit's built-in answer is the simplest and the one most people miss because they only ever see profiles by clicking a username in-thread.

1. Navigate directly to reddit.com/user/USERNAME. Drop the u/ prefix — u/spez becomes reddit.com/user/spez.
2. Click the Comments tab. The default Overview view mixes posts and comments together; the Comments tab strips it to replies only.
3. Change the sort. New is chronological, Top surfaces their highest-scoring replies, and Controversial surfaces the ones that got argued with — often the most revealing when you are vetting somebody.

Each entry shows the comment body, the subreddit, the score, the age, and a link through to the parent thread. On old.reddit.com the same view is denser and loads faster, which matters when you are scanning hundreds of entries — a habit worth keeping since old Reddit remains fully functional alongside the redesign.

What it does well: zero setup, works logged out, covers every subreddit at once.

Where it stops: there is no search box inside a profile. If someone has 4,000 comments and you need the three where they mentioned a specific product, you are scrolling. That is what Method 2 fixes.

Method 2: The author: search operator

Reddit's search supports field operators, and author: is the one that turns a username into a filter rather than a destination. Type this into the search bar at the top of any Reddit page:

author:USERNAME

On its own that is roughly the profile view. The value comes from combining it:

• author:USERNAME subreddit:buildapc — everything they have written in one community.
• author:USERNAME warranty — their comments containing a keyword.
• author:USERNAME subreddit:personalfinance roth — both filters at once.

The operators are documented in Reddit's official help center, and they work in the search bar without any account or API access. One caveat that trips people up constantly: Reddit's search indexes posts far more reliably than comments. A keyword search restricted to an author will miss comments that the index never picked up, especially recent ones and especially in small subreddits. Treat a zero-result search as "not found in the index", never as "they never said it".

If you need certainty rather than a fast answer, fall back to the profile tab and read, or export the threads and search the file — where the search happens on your machine against the complete text rather than against Reddit's index.

Method 3: The .json endpoint (the power-user trick)

Nearly every Reddit URL returns structured data if you append .json. Applied to a profile:

https://www.reddit.com/user/USERNAME/comments/.json?limit=100

Open that in a browser and you get the raw listing — comment bodies, scores, subreddits, UTC timestamps, permalinks, and the after token that lets you page to the next batch. It is the same data the profile page renders, without the rendering.

This is genuinely useful for two things: grabbing a large batch quickly, and seeing fields the UI hides, such as exact created_utc values instead of "3 months ago". It is also how most tutorials tell you to start scripting.

Be realistic about the ceiling, though. You are paging 100 items at a time, you will hit rate limits if you loop aggressively, and the output is deeply nested JSON that needs flattening before any spreadsheet will accept it. Reddit's official API documentation and the Data API Terms set out what automated access is permitted and at what rate — worth reading before you point a loop at it, particularly for anything commercial. If you would rather write Python than parse by hand, PRAW is the long-standing community wrapper and handles authentication and pagination for you.

Method 4: Export the threads to CSV or JSON

The first three methods find comments on a screen. None of them save anything, and none of them give you the conversation around the comment — which is usually the part that decides whether the comment meant what you think it meant.

The practical move is to switch units: instead of chasing one user's comments, export the threads they participated in, then filter by author in the spreadsheet.

1. Collect permalinks. From the profile Comments tab or an author: search, copy the links to the threads you care about. Ten to fifty is a normal working set.
2. Paste them into the Reddit comment exporter. Multiple URLs at once, one per line — old.reddit.com, new.reddit.com, and mobile /s/ share links all resolve correctly.
3. Download as CSV, Excel, or JSON. You get every comment at every depth, with author, body, score, created_utc, permalink, OP flag, distinguished status, plus parent_id and depth columns that let you rebuild the reply tree.
4. Filter to your username. One filter on the author column isolates their comments — and unfiltering shows you exactly what they were replying to.

This inverts the problem in a useful way. You stop being limited by what Reddit's profile pagination will hand back, and you get full-text search over the result, because it is now a file rather than an infinite scroll. The first batch of comments on any thread exports with no signup; a pass lifts the limit for bigger jobs.

If your interest is the thread itself rather than one person in it, the same tool covers that ground — see how to export a Reddit thread for the thread-first version of this workflow, or exporting Reddit comments to Excel for the spreadsheet mechanics, including opening the file without mangling emoji.

The limits nobody mentions

The ~1,000 item wall

Reddit's listings do not paginate forever. Any given sort order tops out at roughly 1,000 entries, and profile comment history is no exception. For an account with 20,000 comments, the profile will show you the most recent thousand and then simply stop producing more.

The partial workaround is that each sort order is a different thousand. New gives you the most recent, Top gives you the highest-scoring across their whole history, and Controversial gives you a third slice. Combining all three reaches further back than any one of them — but there is no supported way to walk a long-lived account's full history end to end.

Deleted and removed comments are gone

A comment deleted by its author or removed by a moderator stops being served publicly. It is not hidden behind a flag you can flip; the body is no longer in the response. Third-party archives that once mirrored Reddit content in bulk are no longer openly queryable following the 2023 API changes, so the honest answer to "how do I see a deleted comment" in 2026 is that you do not.

Suspended, banned, and shadowbanned accounts

If an account is suspended, its profile returns an error and its comments largely disappear from listings even though they may still render inside old threads. A subreddit ban is narrower — it stops future participation but leaves past comments in place.

Search is not a complete index

Worth repeating because it causes the most false conclusions: comment search coverage is partial. Absence of a search result is not evidence of absence.

Practical workflows

Moderators vetting an applicant. Profile → Comments → sort by Controversial. Two minutes there tells you more than an hour of Top. If the account is applying to moderate, export the threads where they were most active and read how they behaved when disagreed with, not just what they scored well on.

Brands tracking a recurring complaint. Start from the complaint, not the person. Search your product name, export the threads, then look at the author column for names appearing repeatedly. Those are the accounts shaping the narrative in that community. Reddit skews toward long-form, unfiltered consumer voice, which is exactly why it is worth mining — the comments are closer to how people actually talk about a category than any survey response.

Researchers sampling discourse. Define subreddits and a date window first, export the threads, and filter authors afterward. Sampling by thread gives you a defensible frame; sampling by scrolling profiles does not. Keep the raw JSON alongside the CSV so timestamps and IDs survive for replication.

Finding your own old comment. Your own profile has no 1,000-item exemption, but you do have one advantage: you know roughly when and where. Use author:YOURNAME subreddit:THATSUB keyword and, if search fails, page the .json endpoint, which will not silently skip entries the way keyword search does.

Why Reddit is easier than every other platform (and still not easy)

It is worth appreciating how unusual Reddit's comment history actually is. On TikTok there is no public comment history at all — you cannot open a stranger's profile and see what they have replied to, which is why finding a TikTok user's comments requires working backwards from videos rather than forwards from the account. Instagram is the same: comments are visible on the post, invisible on the profile. YouTube once exposed a public "Discussion" tab and quietly removed it. Reddit is close to the last major platform where a user's replies are a first-class, linkable, publicly browsable object.

That design choice is deliberate. Reddit's identity model is built around pseudonymous accounts whose credibility comes from their visible track record rather than from a verified real name — the comment history is the reputation. It is why "check their post history" is standard advice in trading and advice subreddits, and why throwaway accounts read as a signal in themselves.

The gap, then, is not access — it is tooling. Reddit hands you the data and gives you nothing to do with it: no search inside a profile, no date range, no filter by score, no export, and a pagination ceiling that hides the long tail. Every method in this guide is really a way of working around that missing layer. Methods 1 and 2 work around it by hand, Method 3 works around it with code, and Method 4 works around it by moving the data somewhere that has the filters Reddit never built.

Where the line is

Reddit is pseudonymous by design, and reading a public comment history is ordinary use of the site. Two things are not: using someone's history to harass them, and using it to work out or publish who they are offline. Reddit's site-wide content policy prohibits both, and posting personal information is one of the few offenses that reliably ends an account. Every method in this guide reads public data that the account chose to post publicly — none of it deanonymizes anybody, and none of it should be used to try. If you are doing research at scale, the Data API Terms are the document that governs what you may store and republish.

Which method should you use?

• Just looking someone up? Profile → Comments tab. Done in ten seconds.
• Looking for something specific they said? author:USERNAME plus a keyword or subreddit — with the caveat that search misses things.
• Need a big batch and comfortable with raw data? The .json endpoint, or PRAW if you are scripting it properly.
• Need to keep, sort, share, or analyze it? Export the threads to CSV or JSON and filter by author there.

The first three are for finding. The fourth is for anything you have to do afterward — and if you are reading a guide about finding a user's comments in the first place, there is usually an afterward.

Start exporting

Paste any Reddit thread URL into the Reddit comment exporter and get every comment — full reply tree, scores, timestamps, permalinks — as CSV, Excel, or JSON. No Reddit login, nothing to install. If Reddit is one of several platforms you monitor, the same workflow covers finding a TikTok user's comments too.