Template script that can retrieve the authors of reddit posts made after a specific date.

pushshift_authors.py

# Retrieves authors of the first 10 posts of /r/politics
# excluding deleted users.
# You can then feed these into DownloaderForReddit
# install pushift.py using `pip3 install pushshift.py`
# from pushshift_py import PushshiftAPI
# I don't know if 'banned_by_rpolitics' is someone's username
# or a banned user.
from pushshift_py import PushshiftAPI
api = PushshiftAPI()

import datetime as dt

start_epoch=int(dt.datetime(2017, 1, 1).timestamp())

l = list(api.search_submissions(after=start_epoch,
                            subreddit='politics',
                            filter=['author'],
                            limit=10))

authors = [i.author for i in l if i.author != '[deleted]']

print(' '.join(set(authors)))   # set() deduplicates the list
# Gaybro1992 banned_by_rpolitics gazil9 therecordcorrected wurstfinga spike -StrangerThanFiction

print(authors)

# ['Gaybro1992', 'banned_by_rpolitics', 'gazil9', 'therecordcorrected', 'wurstfinga', 'spike', '-StrangerThanFiction']