I Scraped 10,000 Reddit Posts to Find the Best Web Scraping Strategy in 2026

Last month I scraped 10,000 Reddit posts across 50 subreddits to answer one question: What is the most reliable way to scrape in 2026? Not hypothetically. I actually ran 200+ scraping sessions, tested 4 different approaches, and tracked what broke and what survived. Here are my results. The 4 Approaches I Tested 1. HTML Parsing (BeautifulSoup + Requests) The classic approach. Parse the rendered HTML, extract with CSS selectors. Result: Broke 3 times in 2 weeks when the site changed their HTML. Unreliable. 2. JSON API Endpoints Many sites expose JSON APIs alongside their HTML pages. Reddit has /r/subreddit.json . import requests url = " https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/top.json?t=month&limit=100 " response = requests . get ( url , headers = { " User-Agent " : " DataBot/1.0 " }) posts = response . json ()[ " data " ][ " children " ] for post in posts : d = post [ " data " ] print ( f ' [ { d [ " score " ] } ] { d [ " title " ] } ' ) Result: Zero breakages in 30 days. The JSON format