Scrape a reddit post submission for comments and save comments to JSON file (revised)
This is much clearer now (hopefully, you also agree).

Some more ideas:

It is sometimes considered cleaner to always define functions before their use.

Some old comments still apply (magic number -6 and some namings), but there may be reasons for not changing that.

Code now almost reached the top of possibilities for non-object-oriented methodology, so I do not think it's worth crossing the line unless desired.

Using module-level or global data is usually frowned upon, because it makes functions to work magically (there are some exceptions of course). In case of module level configuration, one usually need to override the variable (eg, via monkeypatching). It's much easier for the function to accept the context, which may contain configuration. In the code above, load_survey_responses is the only violation I see, again, maybe it is justified. To see specifically what I mean, imaging that you will need to provide fp parameter as a script parameter: it will require changes to the code in several places instead of just providing fp upfront and propagating to further function calls as part of a context.

(Some readers may notice that prepare_survey_update now reminds 
Transaction Script pattern, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16139941/transaction-script-is-antipattern discussion on it's pros and cons)

Now that code became cleaner, I've noticed the script reads and writes to the same file (now it overwrites the file with each call). It's ok as far as you do not do things concurrently. But it's another story.