Subreddit connections

http://redditstuff.github.io/sna/

by jashmenn • 13 years ago

134 33 13 years ago

redditstuff.github.io

nthitz• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

Karunamon2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

A counter-example: r/DepthHub is a meta sub which is both civilized and edifying.

Karunamon2• 13 years ago

Thanks for that. I've been looking for a counter-example to the rule of "meta subs are crap" for a while.

Semaphor2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

I think a flat magnification would solve this. (eg real magnifying glass). The "curvy" magnification is simply annoying.

Donovan• 13 years 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.

pilooch2• 13 years ago

Check this out maybe, http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1dzoim/a_su...

gburt• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

http://ajverster.github.io/blog/2013/04/01/redditinteraction...

sneak• 13 years ago

This reminds me vaguely of Randall Munroe's Map Of Online Communities:

http://xkcd.com/802/

cocoflunchy• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Why would something that's distasteful be automatically illegal?

ceol2• 13 years ago

It's not just distasteful. There is legitimate hate speech there, which some countries deem illegal.

baby• 13 years 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".

pilooch2• 13 years 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/

The system can be queried:

http://demo.xplr.com/xplr/umbreddit/?search=cyclists

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-unsupervise... and here: 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/epicmjpmnm...

binarysolo• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

First, the canvas element does not work everywhere (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

So, it is actually "best viewed in Google Chrome", despite it is indeed standards compliant.

SkyMarshal• 13 years 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.

Subreddit connections

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