5 ms·

Subreddit connections

134 points by jashmenn 13y ago

nthitz 13y ago
Very neat! I wonder if there would be a decent way of including more of some of the default subs without adding too much noise.
1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
"...we are all Touched by His Noodly Appendages"
Karunamon 13y ago
Not surprising that the drama bomb meta subreddits are the biggest connectors (TrueRedditDrama being the largest graphically). I personally think the overall quality/SNR of the entire site would go up if meta subs (a sub who's sole purpose is to link to other subs) were banned outright. They don't seem to do anything but stir up strife and abuse.
- itafroma 13y ago
  > Not surprising that the drama bomb meta subreddits are the biggest connectors (TrueRedditDrama being the largest graphically). The meta subreddits that are prominently featured are only so because the subreddits that have a high degree of interconnectedness were intentionally removed: > Removed nodes with a degree greater than 75 (this was enough to get rid of every sub in the top 20 subreddits (by subscriber). Since these subs are likely to link to a wide variety of topics, an association with one of these subs is not particularly interesting to us. This skews the graph towards subreddits (potentially, but not necessarily, meta subreddits) that are just under the arbitrary cutoff point. So all the very large, interconnected non-meta subreddits are missing, giving a skewed picture of the actual graph. Because of this, even among meta subreddits, notable, extremely prominent ones are missing, like /r/SubredditDrama, /r/ShitRedditSays and /r/bestof.
- chad_oliver 13y ago
  A counter-example: r/DepthHub is a meta sub which is both civilized and edifying.
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    Thanks for that. I've been looking for a counter-example to the rule of "meta subs are crap" for a while.
    - surfgeko 13y ago
      This link I came across has a nice sampling of particularly insightful (mostly meta) subs: http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub+academicphilosophy+aesthetics+theagora+culturalstudies+econpapers+foodforthought+hardscience+indepthsports+indepthstories+laymanjournals+ludology+neurophilosophy+philosophyofscience+politicspdfs+resilientcommunities+scholar+stateoftheunion+truefilm+truereddit+worldevents+interview+designthought http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub+academicphilosophy+aestheti...
      - goblin89 13y ago
        Thanks, didn't know about the plus trick that allows to read posts from multiple subreddits in one feed.
- Semaphor 13y ago
  /r/DailyDot and /r/TLDR are highly interesting meta subs linking to major posts of the previous day. As someone who doesn't subscribe to most defaults I'd miss the occasional interesting story without them. And SubRedditDrama is perfect to brighten my day ;)
omni 13y ago
This is really neat, but the magnify effect makes it absolutely infuriating to hover over one of the points to see its label.
- taopao 13y ago
  I really like the magnification effect. One of the things I don't like about these weighted graphs is that mousing to tiny targets can be a huge PITA. The magnification rectifies this.
  - hayksaakian 13y ago
    I think a flat magnification would solve this. (eg real magnifying glass). The "curvy" magnification is simply annoying.
Donovan 13y ago
This is really useful to me, I'm always wondering about specific subreddits that may interest me. Now I can actually find them. I think there may be other ways to present this information to help people discover subreddits of interest.
- pilooch 13y ago
  Check this out maybe, http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1dzoim/a_subreddit_recommender_with_machine_learning/ http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1dzoim/a_su...
gburt 13y ago
It's unfortunate you removed all the primary subreddits (or degree > 75), it makes a lot of the networks confusing (the gaming network, for example) because they seem to only show niche topics.
- cjbarber 13y ago
  Agree on that point. Also, I believe you have an extremely useful data set here, but the visualization of it could be improved. My goal when looking at the graph is to discover other subreddits that may be of interest, but this is very difficult to do in the current form. Perhaps a way of inputting and highlighting subreddits of interest (as a short term solution)?
asperous 13y ago
This is really well done! I would recommend putting the defaults back in and playing around with and finding a good value for "remove connections that have less than" using a number based on a percentage of the posts in sub instead of an arbitrary 8 connections. For example, remove connections from /r/programming to subs that are cross referenced from /r/programming less than 5% of the time. Again, very nice!
rschmitty 13y ago
For some reason this runs terribly on firefox, blank in ie, chrome works great however (which you kindly point out at the end!)
coyotebush 13y ago
Similar work: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~elie/networks.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~elie/networks.html (on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4914267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4914267) http://ajverster.github.io/blog/2013/04/01/redditinteractionmap/ http://ajverster.github.io/blog/2013/04/01/redditinteraction...
sneak 13y ago
This reminds me vaguely of Randall Munroe's Map Of Online Communities: http://xkcd.com/802/ http://xkcd.com/802/
cocoflunchy 13y ago
Nice work! This got me to venture into some sad subreddits though... Had no idea that /r/niggers was even a thing (wouldn't it even be illegal?).
- throwaway420 13y ago
  Why would something that's distasteful be automatically illegal?
  - ceol 13y ago
    It's not just distasteful. There is legitimate hate speech there, which some countries deem illegal.
    - wnight 13y ago
      Legitimate hate-speech. "No sir, ours is 100% legitimate!"
      - ceol 13y ago
        As opposed to "sarcastic" hate speech, like a joke you might hear on Tosh.0. These people really do believe the things they say, and they are intent on spreading their vitriol as far as they can. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make, though. Unless you really didn't understand what I meant?
    - Semaphor 13y ago
      Not in the US as far as I know though and that's usually what Reddit takes as baseline. Though I think a case could be made banning them for vote brigading but that might create quite some drama considering the 2 big brigading subs (if you discount positive brigading of /r/bestof and /r/defaultgems) SRS and /r/guns are politically sensitive.
- baby 13y ago
  I don't know why you're getting downvoted. Discovered that subreddit through r/ImGoingToHellForThis which is becoming more and more a racist subreddit. I asked there the same question and learned that American put freedom of speech before hate speech and racism (which is not the case in many other countries, France for example). This is why you have the Tea party and other jokes in the US. Reddit is following a clear "US" guiderule which is "whatever goes".
pilooch 13y ago
With others, I recently played around with a custom built dataset, using unsupervised machine learning to cluster the subreddits, based on content. You can play with it here: http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/ http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/ The system can be queried: http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/?search=cyclists http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/?search=cyclists http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/?search=species http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/?search=species For the curious, more technical information is available here: https://xplr.com/xplr-umbrella-dataviz-on-top-of-unsupervised-machine-learning/ https://xplr.com/xplr-umbrella-dataviz-on-top-of-unsupervise... and here: https://xplr.com/a-subreddit-recommender-with-xplr/ https://xplr.com/a-subreddit-recommender-with-xplr/ This analysis is slightly different than the study of cross-posed links. Here the content of posted URLs (not yet comments)is analyzed and subreddits are put into clusters within a search engine. This allows the easy building of a subreddit recommender for Reddit (Chrome only for now): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/preddit/epicmjpmnmjgbmahjcigppkenngbdjbd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/preddit/epicmjpmnm...
binarysolo 13y ago
Wow, I didn't realize a gephi file can be so easily exported to an interactive web object via sigma.js -- great, simple implementation!
Achshar 13y ago
Off topic but I don't like the "best viewed in Google Chrome". Your code should be standards compliant and it will work everywhere.
- bobsy 13y ago
  Why? This looks like a side project, a bit of fun. Author should be free to knock it up how they want. It should also be noted standards compliant !== work everywhere.
- jacomyal 13y ago
  First, the canvas element does not work everywhere (http://caniuse.com/canvas http://caniuse.com/canvas). Also, canvas is faster in Chrome. For instance, here is one benchmark about layered canvases (sigma.js actually layers different canvases): http://jsperf.com/layered-canvases/9 http://jsperf.com/layered-canvases/9 So, it is actually "best viewed in Google Chrome", despite it is indeed standards compliant.
SkyMarshal 13y ago
Can anyone find the cluster of technical/programming subreddits? Closest ones I see are the Startup hub, and java_help. I know they're in there somewhere though.

134 points by jashmenn 13y ago

Very neat! I wonder if there would be a decent way of including more of some of the default subs without adding too much noise.

1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago

"...we are all Touched by His Noodly Appendages"

Karunamon 13y ago

Not surprising that the drama bomb meta subreddits are the biggest connectors (TrueRedditDrama being the largest graphically). I personally think the overall quality/SNR of the entire site would go up if meta subs (a sub who's sole purpose is to link to other subs) were banned outright. They don't seem to do anything but stir up strife and abuse.

itafroma 13y ago
> Not surprising that the drama bomb meta subreddits are the biggest connectors (TrueRedditDrama being the largest graphically). The meta subreddits that are prominently featured are only so because the subreddits that have a high degree of interconnectedness were intentionally removed: > Removed nodes with a degree greater than 75 (this was enough to get rid of every sub in the top 20 subreddits (by subscriber). Since these subs are likely to link to a wide variety of topics, an association with one of these subs is not particularly interesting to us. This skews the graph towards subreddits (potentially, but not necessarily, meta subreddits) that are just under the arbitrary cutoff point. So all the very large, interconnected non-meta subreddits are missing, giving a skewed picture of the actual graph. Because of this, even among meta subreddits, notable, extremely prominent ones are missing, like /r/SubredditDrama, /r/ShitRedditSays and /r/bestof.
chad_oliver 13y ago
A counter-example: r/DepthHub is a meta sub which is both civilized and edifying.
- Karunamon 13y ago
  Thanks for that. I've been looking for a counter-example to the rule of "meta subs are crap" for a while.
  - surfgeko 13y ago
    This link I came across has a nice sampling of particularly insightful (mostly meta) subs: http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub+academicphilosophy+aesthetics+theagora+culturalstudies+econpapers+foodforthought+hardscience+indepthsports+indepthstories+laymanjournals+ludology+neurophilosophy+philosophyofscience+politicspdfs+resilientcommunities+scholar+stateoftheunion+truefilm+truereddit+worldevents+interview+designthought http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub+academicphilosophy+aestheti...
    - goblin89 13y ago
      Thanks, didn't know about the plus trick that allows to read posts from multiple subreddits in one feed.
Semaphor 13y ago
/r/DailyDot and /r/TLDR are highly interesting meta subs linking to major posts of the previous day. As someone who doesn't subscribe to most defaults I'd miss the occasional interesting story without them. And SubRedditDrama is perfect to brighten my day ;)

omni 13y ago

This is really neat, but the magnify effect makes it absolutely infuriating to hover over one of the points to see its label.

taopao 13y ago
I really like the magnification effect. One of the things I don't like about these weighted graphs is that mousing to tiny targets can be a huge PITA. The magnification rectifies this.
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  I think a flat magnification would solve this. (eg real magnifying glass). The "curvy" magnification is simply annoying.

Donovan 13y ago

This is really useful to me, I'm always wondering about specific subreddits that may interest me. Now I can actually find them. I think there may be other ways to present this information to help people discover subreddits of interest.

pilooch 13y ago
Check this out maybe, http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1dzoim/a_subreddit_recommender_with_machine_learning/ http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1dzoim/a_su...

gburt 13y ago

It's unfortunate you removed all the primary subreddits (or degree > 75), it makes a lot of the networks confusing (the gaming network, for example) because they seem to only show niche topics.

cjbarber 13y ago
Agree on that point. Also, I believe you have an extremely useful data set here, but the visualization of it could be improved. My goal when looking at the graph is to discover other subreddits that may be of interest, but this is very difficult to do in the current form. Perhaps a way of inputting and highlighting subreddits of interest (as a short term solution)?

asperous 13y ago

This is really well done! I would recommend putting the defaults back in and playing around with and finding a good value for "remove connections that have less than" using a number based on a percentage of the posts in sub instead of an arbitrary 8 connections. For example, remove connections from /r/programming to subs that are cross referenced from /r/programming less than 5% of the time. Again, very nice!

rschmitty 13y ago

For some reason this runs terribly on firefox, blank in ie, chrome works great however (which you kindly point out at the end!)

coyotebush 13y ago

Similar work: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~elie/networks.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~elie/networks.html (on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4914267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4914267) http://ajverster.github.io/blog/2013/04/01/redditinteractionmap/ http://ajverster.github.io/blog/2013/04/01/redditinteraction...

sneak 13y ago

This reminds me vaguely of Randall Munroe's Map Of Online Communities: http://xkcd.com/802/ http://xkcd.com/802/

cocoflunchy 13y ago

Nice work! This got me to venture into some sad subreddits though... Had no idea that /r/niggers was even a thing (wouldn't it even be illegal?).

throwaway420 13y ago
Why would something that's distasteful be automatically illegal?
- ceol 13y ago
  It's not just distasteful. There is legitimate hate speech there, which some countries deem illegal.
  - wnight 13y ago
    Legitimate hate-speech. "No sir, ours is 100% legitimate!"
    - ceol 13y ago
      As opposed to "sarcastic" hate speech, like a joke you might hear on Tosh.0. These people really do believe the things they say, and they are intent on spreading their vitriol as far as they can. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make, though. Unless you really didn't understand what I meant?
  - Semaphor 13y ago
    Not in the US as far as I know though and that's usually what Reddit takes as baseline. Though I think a case could be made banning them for vote brigading but that might create quite some drama considering the 2 big brigading subs (if you discount positive brigading of /r/bestof and /r/defaultgems) SRS and /r/guns are politically sensitive.
baby 13y ago
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. Discovered that subreddit through r/ImGoingToHellForThis which is becoming more and more a racist subreddit. I asked there the same question and learned that American put freedom of speech before hate speech and racism (which is not the case in many other countries, France for example). This is why you have the Tea party and other jokes in the US. Reddit is following a clear "US" guiderule which is "whatever goes".

pilooch 13y ago

With others, I recently played around with a custom built dataset, using unsupervised machine learning to cluster the subreddits, based on content. You can play with it here: http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/ http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/ The system can be queried: http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/?search=cyclists http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/?search=cyclists http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/?search=species http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/?search=species For the curious, more technical information is available here: https://xplr.com/xplr-umbrella-dataviz-on-top-of-unsupervised-machine-learning/ https://xplr.com/xplr-umbrella-dataviz-on-top-of-unsupervise... and here: https://xplr.com/a-subreddit-recommender-with-xplr/ https://xplr.com/a-subreddit-recommender-with-xplr/ This analysis is slightly different than the study of cross-posed links. Here the content of posted URLs (not yet comments)is analyzed and subreddits are put into clusters within a search engine. This allows the easy building of a subreddit recommender for Reddit (Chrome only for now): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/preddit/epicmjpmnmjgbmahjcigppkenngbdjbd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/preddit/epicmjpmnm...

binarysolo 13y ago

Wow, I didn't realize a gephi file can be so easily exported to an interactive web object via sigma.js -- great, simple implementation!

Achshar 13y ago

Off topic but I don't like the "best viewed in Google Chrome". Your code should be standards compliant and it will work everywhere.

bobsy 13y ago
Why? This looks like a side project, a bit of fun. Author should be free to knock it up how they want. It should also be noted standards compliant !== work everywhere.
jacomyal 13y ago
First, the canvas element does not work everywhere (http://caniuse.com/canvas http://caniuse.com/canvas). Also, canvas is faster in Chrome. For instance, here is one benchmark about layered canvases (sigma.js actually layers different canvases): http://jsperf.com/layered-canvases/9 http://jsperf.com/layered-canvases/9 So, it is actually "best viewed in Google Chrome", despite it is indeed standards compliant.

SkyMarshal 13y ago

Can anyone find the cluster of technical/programming subreddits? Closest ones I see are the Startup hub, and java_help. I know they're in there somewhere though.