Another year! Full of interesting, fun, and sometimes unfathomable events. To celebrate, here are the results from another RAOA census. Don’t worry: The data collected and the results here and completely statistically irrelevant, and the commentary written are probably extremely biased.

Feel free to let us know what you think in the after though. We like feedback. Mostly good feedback, but negative can be okay too.

This year we received a total of 322 responses, which is 36 more than last year!

Anyway, into the results. The first question was: “What is your gender?”. A kind person submitted an answer indicating that we asked about gender and gave options for sex. Thankfully, this was an informal survey and everyone else was able to figure out how to answer anyway.

A whopping 69% of the sub said they identify as a Woman, while only 28% identified as a Man. Some of the other options submitted were:

Nonbinary

Agender

Gender queer

Gender fluid

“Pokemon”

Again, as a surprise to no one, most of our users come from the USA (85%), Canada (5%), and the UK (also 5%). Other answers included Germany, Portugal, SA, France, China, The Netherlands, Jamaica, New Zealand and Ireland.

While over 90% of our users do come from North America, lets remember that Europe is still the far more superior continent because we have better croissants and nicer accents.

Thankfully, the range of the ages on the sub is slightly more varied than their countries. Unfortunately for us older folks, a quarter of the sub is comprised of “youths”. The typical RAOAer is however aged 25–34 years old.

Interestingly, for those ages 18–24, 68% of respondents said they were Female. For the 25–34 age group, this increased to 75% being female. This increase from the average is countered by the 35–44 age group, where only 61% of respondents were female.

Mobile phones continue to increase their dominance over archaic computers for browsing Reddit. In 2016, only 38% answered Phone. Last year, that grew to 49%. In 2018, the increase is even larger to 63%.

It should be noted that the older the respondent was, the more likely they were to choose Desktop/Laptop.

I don’t know how many meetups there were in the last year, but there were around 50 threads created about them. However, only 11% of users said they’ve been to a meetup.

However, the results of the survey are somewhat skewed by what is potentially a large amount of respondents completing it that saw it stickied but never stuck around on the sub. If we filter out people that have been on the sub for less than one month, the percentage increases to 17%!

In terms of smartphone operating system, Android sadly continues to reign supreme. Last year iOS looked like it was making headway towards becoming the dominant OS with 46% of the RAOA market share, but sadly that has now fallen again to 37%.

One person submitted the answer “wimdowsphone”, which gives you a clue about the quality of those things.

Another person submitted the answer “I have a country”. I think they were confused.

Finally, the question we’ve all been wanting the answer to. How many of you guys are single? Well, in 2018 I’m afraid that count has decreased down to a mere 28%. We did include a new option this year of “It’s complicated”, which got 4% of the answers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the younger people are the most likely to be single, accounting for 53% of those that are aged 18–24. The percentage decreases to 22% and 14% for the age groups 25–34 and 35–44.

On average, the males in the sub are slightly more likely to be single than the females. However, because there are more females than males, there are more single females than single males. Enjoy!

A clean half of the sub is employed full time. Unsurprisingly, most of those that answered “Student” fall within the youngest age group.

There were a great deal of custom answers to this one, most of which probably would have fit into an existing category, you ruiners of clean data. One person answered “Fuck my life” — does that pay well?

9% of users have gifted over 50 times, while 30% stated they have never gifted. However, as you can imagine, the longer someone has been on the sub, they more likely their answer was to be in the highest categories.

If we filter out those that have been around for less than a month, that number decreases to 17%.

Moderating a sub like RAOA can be challenging. We have users from all kinds of different backgrounds with very different opinions. We’ve tweaked the rules many times over the years, sometimes to make them harsher, sometimes to make them lenient. In the last couple of year we’ve reached a point where we’re happy with the rules, and thankfully, it seems like you agree. 92% of you agreed that our rules are just right. Of those that disagreed, there was also nearly an even match between “too strict” and “too lenient”!

This year nearly 1/3rd of you preferred Hangout threads over anything else, with Discussions and activities coming 2nd and 3rd places respectively. Gifted posts were one of the least favourite kinds of thread.

The question “How long have you been on the sub?” resulted in such a nice pie chart. I mean really, how often do you see a pie with lovely thick slices like that, no thin parts at all?

As mentioned before, many of the submissions in the “Less than 1 month” category may have been from people doing a drive by visit to the sub and never coming back.

The next question could have been phrased as “Do you prefer cats or are you wrong?” but it looks like most people are wrong, as dog lovers slightly come in on top of cat lovers.

A few people attempted to answer “both”, an answer from those with the smallest cojones. Other answers included birds, unicorns (no), dragons (no), bats (no), your face (acceptable), frogs (no), reptiles (no). Some people attempted to say “all” animals in another pathetic excuse to get out of answering the question.

We also asked if people liked secrets threads. 40% of you have never heard of them, but I’m guessing a lot of those 40% just weren’t here when the last secrets thread ran, 22 days ago. Either that, or you hate looking at popular stickied threads with thousands of comments.

I don’t really have any commentary for the next question, aside from being happy that the clearly superior pizza option won. The only situation where tacos would be better is if you were attempting to compare to deep dish pizza, which isn’t even pizza and is an affront not only to sensibility but good taste.

We also asked what subs people spend the most time on. Naturally, RAOA was at the top, but other subs included:

Askreddit

relationships

nosleep

aww

gonewild (anyone heard of it?)

We also asked for “How would you improve RAOA?” and received 119 responses, some serious, some slightly less so.

We can’t answer all the ideas, but here’s a few:

There should be more activities!

We agree. Feel free to post them :) The best activities are the ones you guys run.

There should be more meetups!

Again, we agree! We can’t really organize them all ourselves though, so that’s where you come in.

More pizza

Just become a mod. We’re basically constantly living on pizza.

Less cliques!

Unfortunately as mods we can’t really ask people, “oh hey, you know how you made friends with some other people? Stop that!”

Get rid of mod centric activities like, “ask the mods for bad advice” because it makes mods look less accessible and above everyone else

This is becoming a reoccurring theme, but again, everyone is welcome to run their own activities too and we’re not stopping anyone from running their own bad advice threads.

You should eject all the feminists

We should eject you from planet earth

Stricter rules on using flirtation to get gifted

Would this really improve the sub? Could you see us fostering a nice atmosphere if each person had a daily limit of one “flirty” line they were allowed to use on the sub?

More nudes

Feel free to add as much nude makeup to your wishlist as you want!

There should be term limits for mods

Unfortunately, this dictatorship will survive your feeble attempt at a coup.

Make it easier to use on mobile!

Sadly, we don’t have any control over the reddit apps or mobile experience.

End the bizarre Morthy worship

I bet you answered most of the other questions wrong too.

— — — —

And lastly, speaking of Morthy worship:

Good choice!