Subreddit connections | Hacker News Reader

Subreddit connections

redditstuff.github.io

134 pointsjashmenn33 comments

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.

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)?

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!

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.

> 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.

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

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

This link I came across has a nice sampling of particularly insightful (mostly meta) subs: http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub+academicphilosophy+aestheti...

Thanks, didn't know about the plus trick that allows to read posts from multiple subreddits in one feed.

/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 ;)

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...

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?).

Why would something that's distasteful be automatically illegal?

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

Legitimate hate-speech.

"No sir, ours is 100% legitimate!"

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?

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.

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".

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

http://xkcd.com/802/

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