The Scenario
You're a comms strategist at a financial services firm, and your director wants crisis talking points ready for any topic that has generated sustained backlash on Reddit in the last month. Not what people are saying favorably — what's polarizing. The posts that attract equal parts rage and defense. The threads where the comment section becomes a flame war. You need 30 of them pulled and cataloged before the team reviews messaging frameworks on Friday.
The bad version:
- Go to Reddit's search, switch the sort to "Controversial," discover that Reddit doesn't expose a simple "controversial across all of Reddit" feed without going subreddit by subreddit
- Spend 40 minutes bouncing between r/personalfinance, r/investing, and three industry-specific subreddits manually copying thread titles
- Paste them into a workbook, realize you have no consistent metadata — some rows have scores, some don't, upvote ratios are missing entirely
The talking points review is Friday morning. This data collection should not be the blocker.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you're working with, and through its built-in Reddit integration it can query for controversial posts and write structured results into your columns.
Get the top 30 most controversial Reddit posts from the last month and write post title, subreddit, score, upvote ratio, comment count, and URL into columns A through F sorted by controversy score descending
What You Get
- Columns A through F: post title, subreddit, current score, upvote ratio, comment count, permalink
- Results sorted by controversy — posts with near-50% upvote ratios and high total engagement surface first
- One row per post, ready to filter by subreddit or upvote ratio threshold
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want to scope the pull to specific subreddits
Your director only cares about controversy in finance and investing communities, not Reddit broadly.
Get the top 30 most controversial posts from the past month across these subreddits: r/personalfinance, r/investing, r/wallstreetbets, and r/stocks — write post title, subreddit, score, upvote ratio, and URL into columns A through E sorted by upvote ratio ascending
The time window needs to come from a cell
You want to reuse this prompt weekly with a variable time range stored in cell B1.
Get the most controversial Reddit posts from the time period specified in cell B1 — write post title, subreddit, score, upvote ratio, comment count, and URL into columns A through F sorted by upvote ratio ascending
You want to flag posts above a controversy threshold
Not all controversial posts are equally useful for talking points. You want only the ones below a 40% upvote ratio.
Fetch the top 50 most controversial Reddit posts from the past month — filter to posts with an upvote ratio below 0.40 and a score above 200 — write post title, subreddit, score, upvote ratio, comment count, and permalink into columns A through F
Full crisis prep pull: controversial posts, flagged by topic and traction
Get the top 50 most controversial Reddit posts from the last 30 days — filter to upvote ratio below 0.45 and score above 100 — classify each post as Finance, Regulation, Fraud, or Other based on the title — write post title, subreddit, score, upvote ratio, classification, and URL into columns A through F sorted by score descending
One prompt replaces an afternoon of tab-switching and manual categorization.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook, ask it to pull the most controversial Reddit posts on your topic from the past month and flag them by theme. Related spoke: Search Reddit for Brand Mentions. Back to the overview: Reddit + Excel.