Background

For this project, I decided to explore what I think is a neglected and underserved niche of LLMs - data analysis. Most of the projects I've seen use LLMs for chatbots, agentic harnesses, or developer tools for generating/reviewing code. But analyzing large data sets seems like the perfect use case. It's small and contained work, repeated many times, without a lot of novel insight.

In particular, Reddit had been in my sights for a while. It's a massive, up to date repository of comments across many topics. My idea was to use LLMs to analyze large amounts of reddit data and uncover insights and general trends. I stumbled across a similar project, redrecs.com which aimed to analyze consumer opinions of certain products (like what's the best hand soap). Unfortunately, Redrec's examples were very limited, and seemingly only analyzed a few hundred posts and comments, whereas I wanted to analyze, say, a few hundred thousand. But Reddit's API was too costly for this to be a serious avenue.

I recently discovered a tool that fixed that for me - Arctic Shift. This tool lets you download archived posts and comments from different subreddits, many going back years or even decades in the past. This completely solved my blocker, and provided me unfettered access to all of the data I needed.

The first subreddit I wanted to target was FoodNYC. It's useful (and entertaining) to browse local restaurants and see a bunch of high quality commentary. Unlike Yelp or Google reviews, I don't think there's a big risk of bots or promoted content (restaurants incentivizing people to leave good reviews), so I think the comments are genuine. The interface is easy to read, there's no intrusive ads, and it encourages people to respond and agree, disagree, or add more insight.

I've used r/FoodNYC to find a variety of different cool restaurants around the city I would not have known about otherwise. Shout out to Talkin' Tacos in Washington Heights and Taqueria Al Pastor in Bushwick.

That said, there's a bunch of problems with the subreddit itself, broken down into the following bullet points:

• Reddit search is notoriously bad and often returns many inaccurate or irrelevant results, especially when searching for a particular restaurant.
• There's no way to filter by restaurant type, cuisine, location etc.
• There's no aggregation of opinions. How do I find out "what do people AS A WHOLE think about this restaurant?"
• There's a bunch of irrelevant posts and comments sprinkled in with the relevant ones.

My goal for this project was to use LLMs to extract all of this useful information from the reddit comments and posts, while addressing and fixing the UX problems of the FoodNYC subreddit.