Comment Dweller

Rank Reddit's top comments by upvotes. Test your instincts, sharpen your skills, and become the ultimate dweller!

Comment

Inspiration

Ever since I started using social media, I've paid as much attention to comments as I have to posts—sometimes even more. On Reddit especially, the comments often become the real content. A good comment can add context, flip the meaning of a post, or turn something ordinary into something genuinely funny or insightful.

That's where Comment Dweller came from. I kept catching myself scrolling straight to the comments and thinking, "Yeah, this is why people upvoted this." The idea was simple: what if recognizing great comments was the game itself? What if you could test your instincts and see whether you actually understand what people tend to upvote?

I also thought about how Reddit has all these older posts with great comments that just... sit there now. Nobody really goes back and looks at stuff from a few years ago unless they're specifically searching for something. So if this game ends up pulling some of those comments back into the light, even just a little, that'd be cool. Maybe someone plays, sees a comment they like, clicks through to the original post. I don't know if that'll actually happen, but it seemed like a decent side effect.

At its core, the game asks one question: can you tell which comments rose to the top just by reading them?

What it does

Comment Dweller is a small daily game built around Reddit's comment culture.

Each day, the app:

  • Picks a random post from selected subreddits' top or hot posts
  • Takes the top four comments from that post
  • Shuffles them into a random order

Your job is to rank those comments from highest to lowest upvotes, based purely on context, tone, and gut feeling. You earn points depending on how accurate your ranking is, and over time you climb through different ranks.

There's no trick—just pattern recognition, intuition, and a bit of Reddit brainrot.

How I built it

I'm a software engineer and game developer, and honestly, this would have been much easier for me to build in Unity. That's what I know best. But instead of taking the comfortable route, I wanted to push myself and build a web app, using tools I wasn't fully comfortable with yet.

I had some experience with APIs, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, but nothing at this scale. After a few days of research and experimentation, I started building the app using Devvit, Reddit's developer platform, and slowly put everything together piece by piece.

It wasn't fast, and it definitely wasn't clean at first—but it worked.

Challenges along the way

Early challenges: fetching the right content

One of the first problems was simply getting the right data. Fetching random posts from selected subreddits and reliably pulling their top four comments turned out to be trickier than expected. A lot of edge cases popped up early.

Video posts

Posts with videos caused issues pretty quickly. Since the game is focused on reading and ranking comments, and video posts added unnecessary complications, I decided to filter them out entirely.

The biggest challenge: GIFs in comments

By far the hardest problem was handling comments that included GIFs. Reddit often embeds GIFs using Giphy, and I couldn't fetch or display them directly. On top of that, Devvit's Content Security Policy doesn't allow external requests from the frontend, which ruled out the obvious solutions.

The workaround was building a proxy on the backend. The backend fetches the GIF content and serves it through the app itself, bypassing CSP limitations in a safe way. It wasn't something I planned from the start, but it ended up being one of the most valuable things I learned during the project.

What I'm proud of

  • I built a complete game using tools I wasn't comfortable with at first
  • I worked around real platform constraints instead of avoiding them
  • The core gameplay loop actually works and feels intuitive
  • The app highlights genuinely funny, clever, or insightful comments
  • It captures what I personally enjoy most about Reddit: the comments

There are still rough edges, but the foundation is solid—and that was the goal.

What I learned

Building this taught me way more than I expected. I got comfortable with Devvit's architecture, learned how to work within CSP constraints, and picked up a lot about API design and state management. The GIF proxy problem especially forced me to think creatively—you can't always solve things the obvious way, and sometimes that leads to better solutions.

What's next

Obviously, in the future I want to add global leaderboards and streaks to make scores feel more meaningful and rewarding. Beyond that, the core idea of the game has potential far beyond Reddit.

For example, for YouTube content creators, there could be a section on their channel that pulls a random video and its comments, then asks viewers to rank them. That kind of interaction could turn passive watching into something more engaging.

On Reddit specifically, there’s room for much deeper integration. Comments that appear in the game could receive special highlights, giving them extra visibility beyond the game itself. Daily featured posts could be showcased directly on Reddit, creating a bridge between the game and the platform.

Ideally, users would be able to upvote or award comments directly from within the game. This kind of interaction wouldn’t just improve engagement inside the app—it could also help revive posts that didn’t initially get much attention, giving posts and comments a second chance to be discovered.

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