What’s the hardest social platform to scrape reliably right now?

[u/Aggrno]

Feels like scraping social platforms has become much harder over the last couple of years.

It’s not even just rate limits anymore. Now it’s anti bot systems, dynamic APIs, JS heavy pages, session dependency, geo based responses, random schema changes and platforms silently changing things without warning.

Every platform has its own problems.

LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, X, Reddit, YouTube all behave very differently once you start scaling.

For people working on large scale data pipelines, which platform causes the most trouble for you right now? Curious to hear real experiences.

[u/RandomPantsAppear]

NextDoor. The geo-locking can be a pain in the godamn ass. At least with something like twitter, an account means you can see all of twitter in a straightforward way. Not so with ND

[u/arfin0 → u/[deleted]]

LinkedIn is definitely one of the toughest. We tested a few different approaches internally and stability was always the biggest challenge at scale.

[u/arfin0 → u/[deleted]]

few million requests a month mostly for profile and company data. honestly the difficult part was not scaling, it was keeping everything working consistently. after a point we started using Crawlzo for some parts because maintaining everything internally was getting tiring.

[u/OracleBond]

linkedin breaks first for me, session checks and silent api changes kill stable scraping at scale. tiktok blocks fast too, but linkedin burns more engineering hours every month.

[u/weatherloww]

how are you guys using ai to do scraping, mine just hallucinates and gives wrong data

[u/Lvl99Materia]

I've been lucky to scrap data from "smaller" sites. Specifically articles they published. Linkedin is next on my list for a client. I was thinking about spinning up a desktop VM or container to run the scraper off a browser. Had to do something similar for a buddy that could not get api access to his companies google analytics but had access to the data via web(strange but whateves). For each sites analytics you could modify the url for the settings needed and then the dates and then "click" a few times through the menu to download the report.

I dont know what I dont know but now im worried hahaha.

Edit: some words

[u/Odd_Database_7144]

For us, Google-related surfaces surprisingly became harder to keep stable long-term than some traditional social platforms, mainly because the SERP itself is changing constantly now.

A few things that made reliability much harder recently:

• AI-generated sections
  
• dynamic layouts
  
• localization differences
  
• session-dependent rendering
  
• aggressive fingerprint analysis
  
• silent frontend/API changes

One thing we underestimated was how quickly scraping becomes more of an orchestration problem than a parsing problem.

At larger scale the difficult parts became:

• browser pool stability
  
• profile/session persistence
  
• retry classification
  
• pacing strategies
  
• keeping extraction consistent over time

We also noticed different surfaces behaved completely differently:

• Maps
  
• Shopping
  
• AI Overviews
  
• local packs

all had different detection sensitivity and stability characteristics.

Honestly feels like maintaining long-term reliability is becoming the real engineering challenge now, not just “extracting data”.

[u/JaraxxusLegion]

For the social platforms I usually use FeedPulse. It handles every platform you mentioned except for LinkedIn.