Not necessarily from a webpage. Web browsers support [1] what's called the WebSocket API [2], which allows browsers to create socket connections to a socket se

Not necessarily from a webpage. Web browsers support [1] what's called the WebSocket API [2], which allows browsers to create socket connections to a socket server. But many programming languages also provide a library to create socket connections on the server. This is what most reddit bots would be doing, as demonstrated in the rockets-client [3], which uses a Node.js websocket library called 'ws'. So it's incredibly flexible. You could wrap a UI around it in the browser, or use it server-side with any mainstream programming language that supports websockets. [1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets [2] http://www.websocket.org/aboutwebsocket.html http://www.websocket.org/aboutwebsocket.html [3] https://github.com/rtheunissen/rockets-client https://github.com/rtheunissen/rockets-client