prism

Every comment on a post, replies nested, server-paginated to completion.

Give it any TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, or Instagram post URL and it harvests every top-level comment (paginated to the end) with replies nested where the platform supports it (TikTok, YouTube, Facebook). Reddit and Hacker News return their whole nested thread. Instagram comes back top-level only, because its comment source has no reply leg to walk; its replies are still reachable, one call per parent comment, from GET /v1/instagram/post/comment/replies (post url plus the parent comment_id, cursor-paged, 1 credit a call). Every Instagram comment carries engagement.replies, so call it only for the comments whose count is above zero. Pass sort=top to get the most-liked comments first (ranked by engagement.likes): ideal for pulling the top comments on a high-volume post; pair it with limit to cap how many you get back (e.g. sort=top&max=500&limit=200 scans ~500 and returns the top 200). YouTube sorts upstream so its top set is exact; other platforms are sorted across the scanned set. Metered at 1 credit per internal page call (minimum 2): sort/limit never change the price, which always follows pages scanned (max). Instagram is the exception: an Instagram post URL is a flat 5 credits per call whatever max and replies you pass, because that source returns the comment set in one mobile-upstream call rather than by page. Returns sync JSON, or a typed SSE stream when you send Accept: text/event-stream: a page chunk lands as each page settles. The next_cursor is one opaque token that resumes every leg; legs[] reports each page's status, cost, and latency.

get/prism/comments

Request

  • Base URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1
  • URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/prism/comments
  • Auth: API key in header x-api-key

Query parameters

urlstring required

Absolute http(s) URL of the post whose comments to harvest.

maxinteger

Stop after roughly this many top-level comments (1-5000, default 1000). Whole pages are returned, so the actual count can slightly exceed this. Drives billing and, for sort=top, the depth of the ranking scan.

repliesboolean

Expand replies for comments that have them, where the platform supports it (default true; TikTok/YouTube/Facebook). Reddit and Hacker News always return their whole nested thread and ignore it. On Instagram it has no effect and is never charged for: take comment.id from any comment whose engagement.replies is above zero and call GET /v1/instagram/post/comment/replies instead. Pair with replies=false when you only want the top comments.

cursorstring

Opaque composite cursor from a prior response's next_cursor to resume harvesting.

sort'top' | 'recent'

recent (default: natural order) or top (most-liked first, ranked by each comment's like count). With top, the response adds sorted_by: "likes_desc". On Instagram, top returns the platform's own ranked head (sorted_by: "popular") rather than a re-sort, and that head is finite: use the default recent to harvest a whole Instagram thread.

limitinteger

Cap on how many top-level comments to return after sorting/scanning (1-5000, defaults to max). Truncates only the returned set, never what was scanned or billed. The response reports returned.

Headers

Cache-Controlstring

Send no-cache to bypass the response cache and force a live fetch. Billed at the normal endpoint cost; the fresh result is written back to cache for the next caller. Only the no-cache directive triggers this. See the Response Schema guide for details.

Idempotency-Keystring

Optional UUID that makes the request safely retriable. The key is reserved atomically per account before billing. A concurrent retry receives 409 IDEMPOTENCY_IN_PROGRESS with a Retry-After of 1 second while the original is young, growing to a quarter of the time it has been running (at most 30); a crashed reservation expires after 5 minutes. A replay keeps the cached payload immutable except for billing metadata: credits_used becomes 0, idempotent_replay becomes true, and credits_remaining is refreshed to the current balance. A known current balance appears in both the body and X-Credits-Remaining header; no balance row resolves to 0. On a transient lookup failure, body credits_remaining is null and X-Credits-Remaining is omitted. Completed outcomes expire after 24 hours. If the claim store is unavailable, the request fails closed before billing. GET endpoints do not combine idempotent replay with Server-Sent Events: use Accept: application/json when sending this header. The unsupported key-plus-SSE combination is rejected before billing.

Response

Successful response

successboolean required

Whether the request succeeded

platformstring required

Platform name

endpointstring required

API endpoint path

credits_usedinteger required

Number of credits consumed

credits_remaininginteger nullable required

Current account balance, or null when this response could not establish one. Free cache hits always return null because they do not establish an authoritative post-request balance. An idempotency replay also returns null when its current-balance lookup fails. It is never a fabricated zero, so a zero here means the account really is empty. The authoritative reading is the one on a billed response, which comes straight from the deduction.

request_idstring required

Unique request identifier for support

cachedboolean required

Whether the response was served from cache

idempotent_replayboolean

True only when this response is an idempotency replay

Example response

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "prism",
  "endpoint": "/v1/prism/comments",
  "credits_used": 1,
  "credits_remaining": 4999,
  "request_id": "req-abc123",
  "idempotent_replay": true,
  "meta": {
    "hint": {
      "code": "search_multi",
      "message": "You searched \"matcha\" on 3 platforms one call at a time; /v1/search/multi returns each platform's own search rows in one call at the same price per platform, and a platform with no rows is not charged.",
      "method": "GET",
      "path": "/v1/search/multi?query=matcha&platforms=instagram,tiktok,youtube"
    }
  }
}

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.