I got bored today and threw together some Python code to scrape word frequencies from Reddit and make word clouds. Everyone on Reddit seemed to love them, so I put them up on github so everyone could start making their own word clouds. All that’s really left to do is connect these scripts to a word cloud generating library so we don’t even have to copy & paste text into Wordle any more. If you’re up to the task, please email me and fork away on github.

Making word clouds for subreddits is a surprisingly effective way to get a gist for what a subreddit is really talking about. Take /r/evolution, for example. They’re serious business about evolution.

Others were more amusing. /r/trees, for example, seems to be preoccupied with cursing about things.

whereas /r/aww can be concisely described by “upvote cats, fuck humans.”

Even the /r/space nerds seem to get riled up when discussing NASA, terraforming, and meteorites.

Come join in on the fun and make some word clouds for your favorite subreddit: https://github.com/rhiever/reddit-analysis