Most of the social data questions on here end up in the same place: someone needs posts or comments from a platform, the official API gives them two thirds of what they need, and they are trying to work out whether filling the gap is worth it. This is the decision framework I use before writing any collection code.
What The Official API Actually Gives You
An API gives you a documented schema, stable field names, and a rate limit you can plan around. That last part matters more than people expect, because a documented limit is a budget you can design a queue against instead of a mystery you discover in production.
What it does not give you is coverage. Platforms have narrowed their public endpoints repeatedly, and the fields most projects actually want, full comment trees, historical posts past a window, engagement counts on other people's content, are frequently the ones that got removed. So the API is the right default and a poor complete answer.
Where Direct Collection Fills The Gap
Direct collection reads the same public pages a logged out visitor sees. It covers the fields the API dropped, and it costs you a parsing layer that breaks whenever the markup changes.
The pattern that survives is a hybrid. Use the API wherever the endpoint exists, use direct collection only for the specific fields it cannot serve, and reconcile the two on stable ids and timestamps so you can tell which source produced a given record. If your pipeline cannot answer "where did this row come from", debugging a mismatch six months later is guesswork.
Treat A Block As Rate Feedback
Every large platform scores request patterns, browser fingerprints and timing. The useful mental model is not that you are up against a puzzle to solve, it is that you are being told your collection rate does not look like a person.
Real browser sessions, honest pacing, retries with backoff, and a hard stop when the platform signals no. Pipelines built that way keep running for months. The aggressive ones work for a week and then poison the whole project, because once you are blocked you have also lost the public access you started with.
Decide These Before You Write Code
Which specific fields do you need, and does the API already serve them. What is your collection rate, and would a human plausibly produce it. Are you touching anything behind a login, because that is the line where a public data project becomes something else. And what is your retention story, since privacy law applies to personal data even when it was posted publicly.
Answer those four and the implementation is the easy part. I wrote up the longer version, including the platform by platform data breakdown, the Python libraries, and the legal and ethical considerations, in this guide to social media scraping.
The short version: collect public data only, at a rate you would be comfortable explaining, and keep the two sources honest about where each record came from.
