Graphit

This is an experimental tool that displays reddit submissions as network graphs.

What the graph shows

Nodes in the graph correspond to users who participate in a discussion on reddit. The edges show relations between users based on comments directly on the submission and replies to other comments.

Nodes are sized based on in-degree, i. e. the number of comments and comment replies addressed to the corresponding user. Edges are sized based on the number of interactions between 2 redditors within the discussion.

Node colors indicate the total score across all comments and/or the submission itself for a single user. Totals greater that zero are blue and others red. The higher the absolute score value the darker the color.

You can graph submissions from deleted users. Comments from deleted users are displayed as single nodes, because several redditors who participated in a thread may have been deleted afterwards and they cannot be distinguished any more.

When reddit threads reach a certain size not all comments are loaded at once. Additional comments will be shown on reddit when clicking on "load more comments" links. Graphit loads additional comments automatically with a short delay between each request. Thus, for large threads it will take a while until the graph is complete. You can still interact with the graph (see below) or watch it grow.

Interacting with the graph

You can load a new discussion by entering the complete URL in the input field at the top of this page.

You can navigate and zoom the graph with the buttons at the bottom. You can drag the graph by clicking and holding the left mouse button while over a node and then moving the mouse.

You can show the comments of a user by clicking on the corresponding node. This should work with a single mouse click, but sometimes you need to click more than once.

Watch the video below for a quick demo on how to interact with Graphit. The mouse actions are shown in the lower left part.

Credits and todos

Graphit is built upon the current alpha release of D3.js version 4 and uses the canvas API to draw the graph. This example graph by Mike Bostock served as a starting point.

There are some issues and todos listed below in this version, that I hope to address in the future:

node info is not always shown after mouse click

improve comment display: show parent above and replies below comment