poddit

Reddit has plenty of good discussions, but reading long threads is a bad fit for commuting, exercising, or chores. Poddit was an experiment in turning top subreddit posts into something you could listen to instead.

The app fetches the day's best posts and comments, rewrites them into a script, generates audio, and publishes the result as a lightweight podcast episode.

the pipeline

Poddit runs as a scheduled workflow:

1. fetch top posts and comments with the Reddit API
2. summarize and reshape the material into a script
3. synthesize the script into audio
4. store the episode and expose it in the app

The backend uses Firebase Cloud Functions, Firebase Storage, and Firestore. The frontend is an Angular app where users can browse episodes, subscribe to subreddits, and listen to previous runs.

what needed care

The interesting work was in the constraints:

• rate limits on the Reddit side
• context limits when bundling several posts and comment threads into one prompt
• audio quality so the final result sounded listenable instead of robotic
• cost controls for LLM and TTS usage

The prompt design mattered too. Reddit content is informal and chaotic, so the script generator had to keep the tone readable without flattening everything into the same bland summary.

why I liked the project

Poddit was a good example of format conversion as a product idea. The raw material already existed. The value came from packaging it in a form that fit a different moment of use.

It was also a useful reminder that automation only feels good when it is narrowly scoped. A daily digest worked. Trying to reproduce all of Reddit in audio would not have.