The real deal.

What happens when you click

1. You click the extension icon on any Reddit page.
2. The popup opens and immediately starts working — no button to press, no menu to navigate.
3. The extension checks the current tab's URL to figure out what kind of Reddit page you're on (post, subreddit feed, or user profile).
4. It reads one small DOM detail from the page: the active sort order (hot, new, top, best, rising, controversial). This is more reliable than guessing from the URL.
5. It makes authenticated requests to Reddit's JSON API to pull the comments it needs to analyze.
6. Top commenters, sentiment, and phrase cloud all render in the popup as soon as the data comes back.

What the extension reads

What the extension does locally

All the analysis — sentiment scoring, comment counting per author, phrase extraction, ranking — happens in your browser in JavaScript. No server does any of it. The most recent result is cached locally on your device for 60 seconds so reopening the popup on the same Reddit page doesn't re-hit Reddit's rate limit; the cache entry is overwritten on the next run and removed when you uninstall the extension.

The sentiment lexicon is a hand-curated list of positive, negative, and hedge words calibrated for Reddit-specific vocabulary (internet slang included). A comment is scored by the net lean of its matched words. Thresholds turn the score into “positive,” “neutral,” or “negative.”

The phrase cloud extracts 3-word sequences, drops any that repeat filler patterns, and surfaces the ones that actually recur. We deliberately skip 2-word phrases because they're mostly filler (“in the,” “of a”).

What the extension never does

• Never sends your browsing data anywhere.
• Never sends the comments it reads to any third-party server.
• Never reads your Reddit password. (It can't — Chrome wouldn't allow it.)
• Never persists anything beyond a single 60-second result cache on your own device (overwritten on each new run, gone when you uninstall).
• Never runs when you're not on a Reddit page. The permissions don't extend beyond reddit.com.

Permissions, explained plainly

• activeTab — lets the extension know what URL you're currently on, only when you click the icon. It does not give us background access to your browsing.
• cookies — scoped to reddit.com only. Used to read your existing Reddit login cookie so we can make authenticated requests to Reddit and avoid rate limits. The cookie never leaves your machine.
• scripting — lets us read the one DOM detail we need (the active sort dropdown) from the Reddit page you're on. We don't inject anything persistent.
• storage — caches the most recent analysis result on your device for 60 seconds so reopening the popup on the same Reddit page doesn't blow through Reddit's rate limit. Never leaves your machine.

Throttling and etiquette

Reddit rate-limits aggressive clients. Our throttling — 1200ms between requests anonymously, 200ms when authenticated — is calibrated to stay well under the ceiling. If Reddit throttles us anyway on a particular post, we skip that post and show you a small note in the meta line instead of failing the whole run.