Reddit.com: Design and Most Popular Subreddits¶

by Anton Tarasenko [email protected] http://antontarasenko.com

Reddit's selection of the items for the main menus substantially impacts the popularity of subreddits.

The data¶

%pylab inline
pylab.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (12.0, 9.0)
pylab.rcParams.update({'font.size': 16})

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv('top_100.csv')

df.head()

Populating the interactive namespace from numpy and matplotlib

Variables:

subscribers: The number of subscribers on 2015-05-07
subscribers13: The number of subscribers in 2013
in_horiz_menu: Is the subreddit in the Reddit's horizontal menu?
in_dropdown_menu: Is the subreddit in the dropdown (main) menu?

What's wrong?¶

The numbers of subscribers for the top 53 subreddits steadly decline...¶

df['subscribers'][:54].plot(kind='line', title='Top 53 Subreddits by Subscribers')

<matplotlib.axes.AxesSubplot at 0x106671470>

... as well as the numbers of subscribers after the 53-th subscriber¶

df['subscribers'][55:].plot(kind='line', title='Top 54-100 Subreddits by Subscribers')

<matplotlib.axes.AxesSubplot at 0x106758be0>

But between the 54th and 55th subreddits you'll find a discontinuity:¶

df['subscribers'][50:60].plot(kind='bar', title='Subreddits from 50th to 60th')

<matplotlib.axes.AxesSubplot at 0x1069af470>

This discontinuity is caused by Reddit's design choices:¶

df[:][50:60]

Not being in the menus implies a free-times fall in popularity, as we see from the difference between "TwoXChromosomes" and "woahdude". Subreddit "atheism", which is between them, was excluded from the menus after 2012 (snapshot).

Data Sources¶

The data is available on GitHub:

github.com_top.json
reddit.com_dropdown.txt
reddit.com_horizontal.txt
redditlist.com.txt

Sources:

	subreddit	subscribers	subscribers13	in_horiz_menu	in_dropdown_menu
funny	funny	8491543	3997640	True	True
announcements	announcements	8478507	3931064	False	True
AskReddit	AskReddit	8473368	3751470	True	True
pics	pics	8409451	3921652	True	True
todayilearned	todayilearned	8343499	3614904	True	True

	subreddit	subscribers	subscribers13	in_horiz_menu	in_dropdown_menu
creepy	creepy	2828707	141134	True	True
UpliftingNews	UpliftingNews	2808352	42540	True	True
WritingPrompts	WritingPrompts	2709230	10547	True	True
TwoXChromosomes	TwoXChromosomes	2675974	142768	True	True
atheism	atheism	2087359	2118004	False	False
woahdude	woahdude	787241	328720	False	False
trees	trees	736871	475744	False	False
leagueoflegends	leagueoflegends	680038	305868	False	False
4chan	4chan	634853	326503	False	False
programming	programming	611973	450788	False	False