I'm currently working on a workflow that involves collecting public Instagram comments for research, campaign monitoring, and engagement analysis.

My initial thought was to build a userscript with Tampermonkey, but after experimenting with Instagram's constantly changing frontend, rate limits, and dynamic loading, maintaining a userscript seems to require frequent updates.

As an alternative, I started testing a Chrome extension called Instagram Comments Scraper. It exports public Instagram comments directly to CSV or Excel, supports large comment threads, resumes automatically after temporary rate limits, and processes everything locally in the browser instead of sending data to external servers.

For my use case, the exported fields (comment text, username, profile URL, timestamp, and comment ID) are enough for:

Sentiment analysis
Campaign performance tracking
Giveaway participant management
Competitor research
Building datasets for NLP experiments

I'm interested in hearing how others approach this problem.

If you've built a userscript for Instagram comment extraction, how do you handle UI changes and pagination? Do you prefer maintaining a custom script, or do you find browser extensions more reliable for long-term use?

I'd appreciate hearing about your workflows, technical challenges, or any open-source alternatives you've found useful.