This is a great idea for a project, the 'users who also posted' metric seems to have worked really well.
The site seems to fail to load the 'hot' items for the subreddits when I click on them but that's not a big deal for me. On closer inspection, it doesn't seem to be making any requests. Just says `Failed to download https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/hot.json` etc
The accuracy of this meme is stunning. I run an anime-related discord of 20-odd people and at least half of people there work in tech in some way. I've seen similar things in order such communities.
I wonder if this is just a cultural artifact from the time that anime and technology were both "geeky" niche interests (to a greater extent than they are now) or if there's a deeper underlying reason...
It may be a stereotype, but to me it seems that in geek circles it is much more acceptable to admit to continuing to appreciate things often seen as "childish" elsewhere in general.
That could be cool, but it would eliminate any subs that don't allow crossposting. That includes a few of the heavy hitters like ShowerThoughts and AskReddit.
hmmm... I don't see the error on my end. What browser do you use? Can you try in "incognito" mode? Are there any extensions that might be blocking this?
Doesn't work for me either, on Firefox Developer Edition 65.0b10 (64-bit) with no extensions enabled (disabled them all to double-check it wasn't one of them blocking it).
Works fine in Edge.
It's purely the loading of the Hot sidebar, everything else works fine. It has already helped me find a few new subs I didn't know existed, so thanks!
https://jsbin.com/fuyijan/2/edit?js,console - this works in Chrome, and non-private mode of Firefox Quantum (64.0.2 (64-bit)). However when I open private browsing in Firefox Quantum request fails.
(I'm guessing reddit's "social button" is considered a tracker.)
[edit] confirmed, it's definitely Content Blocking: I just loaded that jsbin in an FF private window, and there's a message in the console to that effect.
>(I'm guessing reddit's "social button" is considered a tracker.)
It wouldn't surprise me. Even though /r/ has concepts like "Silver" and "Gold" to generate revenue, I think it's main driver is still advertising; so, for it to behave like Facebook, Google, etc. wouldn't be that much of a stretch of the imagination. (Or maybe I'm just far too paranoid?)
It's a cool tool, but it seems very biased towards bigger subs. If you let it loose on a small sub it will emphasize that big, kinda-but-not-really related subs over tiny-but-closely-related subs.
It's a shame since this tool would be particularly useful for recommending small subs. I don't need it to tell me about big subs, since I already know them.
This is seriously amazing man! Interesting to see how different subject-areas network themselves differently.
For example, comparing "r/permaculture" to "r/linux".
Also, looking at r/girlgamers makes me realize my privilege for being able to navigate my interest areas without such a clusterfuck of bullshit going on:
https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=girlgamers
I checked VXjunkies and found the level of weirdness I haven't expected. Will need a few hours to browse through this while nobody is around / can be startled by sudden, random laughter...
Good call. I was worried that I'd "spam" the browser history and people who are coming from reddit or HN would never go back to where they came from :)
Usability improvement idea: make it easier to discover how to re-center the graph around a new subreddit.
I spent several minutes playing around with this, and I was just typing in the name of the desired subreddit because that was the only I could figure out. Finally, after much experimenting, I realized double-clicking is the solution.
Oh, and a second, related usability idea: if I double-click, don't open the preview sidebar at the right. I can see how the sidebar is useful, but if I'm doing one action, I don't want it to have two effects. Also, I have signaled clear intent to browse the graph, so I want more screen real estate to be devoted to that.
EDIT: bonus usability idea/request: clicking on a node brings up the preview sidebar. It'd be nice if clicking on it again (not double-clicking) makes the sidebar hide again.
I didn't use pushshift, sorry. The data was collected from bigquery, stored locally into CSV files, and then I just wrote a node.js script to compute similarities.
There, I only built a user edge if a given user commented on 5 distinct threads in a subreddit, since a lot of subreddit interaction was due to brigading.
Great tool! This site supports my suspicions that much of the activity on /r/The_Donald is the coordinated effort of a few individuals posting across multiple accounts. For those not familiar with this sub, it was created sometime during the 2016 election leadup and unabashedly supports Donald Trump with memes and shitposting. At one point, the entire frontpage of reddit was just posts from /r/The_Donald until reddit admins had to alter their algorithm to force the sub off.
If you look at the network graph for /r/The_Donald, it doesn't look...organic. There are 4 clearly delineated clusters of sub related to that sub. Posters to /r/The_Donald heavily post to /r/news & /r/politics, /r/TropicalWeather (?), /r/TwoXChromosomes (?) and /r/AskTheDonald (and other alt-right subs).
There's not much interaction with the rest of reddit. Posters from other subs don't also post content to the /r/The_Donald.
This is unusual.
Every other sub I've looked at there's a much more complex & dynamic graph where users post across various communities across the site. Every other major sub looks like a real network with dozens of interconnected links. Yet, /r/The_Donald, with almost 700,000 subscribers only has a strong connection to 4 clusters.
The alternate hypothesis is that people on that sub heavily use alternate accounts. This might also explain the lack of interaction with the site compared to other subs of similar size.
* /r/askscience is nested at the center of defaults (I think a lot of older, famous subs will end up highly connected)
* /r/relationship_advice is kind of a loner. The graph generates six distinct subreddit clusters- feminism, lgbt-issues, counseling, and misc. science fields. The last cluster is a very large, diffuse cluster of sex/porn/depression subreddits that skew towards defaults.
* /r/slatestarcodex has distinct clusters too. 1) Effective altruism and philosophy, 2) Psychiatry, 3) Rational fiction writing, 4)Liberal-tarian, IDW defaults, 5) "Classic effort post" subs like true_reddit and depth_hub.
* /r/bigboye is a tiny part of a very large network of animal gifs subreddits. /r/animalsbeingbros connects it to a bunch of high volume gif subs.
>/r/the_donald has a surprising link to /r/TwoXChromosomes
I don't think it's surprising. Donald fans on social media tend to hate minorities and women, not surprised they would try to brigade women oriented subs.
It got so bad that subs like /r/offmychest automatically ban people that post in many alt right related subreddits.
Lots of people feel uprooted from sex-positive and/or tightly-bound communities they've been part of for years, and don't know how to rediscover or rebuild the healthy networks they've lost on Tumblr. I know full-grown adult women who are struggling to find footing again in the most personal of spaces.
The site seems to fail to load the 'hot' items for the subreddits when I click on them but that's not a big deal for me. On closer inspection, it doesn't seem to be making any requests. Just says `Failed to download https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/hot.json` etc