Reddit post karma trajectories

Results from five subreddits

The_Donald

gonewild

AskReddit

IAmA

dataisbeautiful

I collected data over a period of ten days on the progress of post rankings through the following subreddits:

To do this, I wrote a python script which reads the top 100 posts in each of these subreddits every two minutes and dumps the results into a sqlite database.

To visualise the results, I then wrote an R script which can select a sample of these posts and display them in three dimensions - for example by post age in days, post score (net "karma" - how many times more it's been upvoted than downvoted) and number of comments. That's all very well, but you can only really get a feeling for the data if you can rotate the 3D plot. Fortunately, R also comes with a library called rglwidget (now part of the RGL library) which can render a 3D plot as a Javascript object that you can manipulate with your mouse in your browser.

The 3D objects take a lot of RAM to display, so I put them on separate pages. You can click the static graphs on this page to get to the rotatable graphs.

The graphs

All five subreddits in one graph

— The_Donald — gonewild — AskReddit — IAmA — dataisbeautiful