I recently created my first post for this blog and was thinking of when I should post it to reddit on the burgeoning subreddit r/dataisbeautiful, but before I did that I wanted to figure out when the best time for me to post would be for the greatest chance at karma and discussion, so I collected data on the top posts posted in that subreddit and determined when I would submit my post. Then it got me thinking that it might be interesting what times the most popular posts were submitted in all of reddit and if there was some pattern. I collected the necessary data of the top 1000 posts with python using praw, manicured it a bit in excel and finally used R for the visuals.

The first graph is the count of the top posts for each day of the week. Clearly Monday is the most popular day with 230 of the top 1000 posts. The next two graphs combine the same data, but represent it differently, showing the count of the top posts for each hour of the day (Pacific Standard Time). It seems the best time to make posts to reddit is Mondays at around 2-3 PM PST.

Ultimately, I decided this will be my first post (hopefully of many) and I’ll be posting it on Monday at around 3PM PST.

Update: I’m actually posting this at ~ 10 AM on Monday to r/dataisbeautiful as it appears, unsurprisingly, that the best times to post are subreddit dependent and after a quick analysis I determined that was the best time for a post to r/dataisbeautiful.

Update 2: As someone kindly pointed out this isn’t normalized for traffic so really all this may be saying is when the traffic is greatest on Reddit or when someone is like to submit a post. Nevertheless, it could still be a good time to post as more people are likely to see it, or it could just be completely buried.

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