Communiviz

In April 2013 I posed the question: has anyone ever tried to perform social network analysis on Reddit by visualising the links between different subreddits? As you can see from the discussion on that page, several other attempts have also been made at answering this question, mainly by using sidebar links to define connections between subreddits.

Here are my attempts at creating an interactive map of Reddit:

Vizit

Go to Vizit Go to Vizit

After creating my original self-post map (see below) I was unsatisfied with how little of Reddit was represented in this dataset. To that end I created a new dataset, this time defining links by the number of times subreddits contain links to the same websites (so not just other sections of reddit). This dataset was much larger, so I had to make the visualisation more interactive to allow you to hide parts of the network in order to focus on the bits you care about. Click here to try it out.

Offshoots

You may also want to check out Rhiever's redditviz site. This uses the vizit code to visualise a slightly different dataset comprising link submissions, self-posts, and comments on reddit. Check out the research paper by Michigan State University if you'd like to know how the dataset was produced.

Self-post map

Click for an interactive version

This was my first attempt at mapping the relationships between subreddits, with associations defined by a redditor posting a link to one subreddit in another subreddit. In order to make the map usable, I had to remove a lot of data (which is why many subs are missing). This work has largely been superseded by Vizit now, but I've left here for reference, due to the media interest it received.

Press

It just so happened that a few online media types picked up on this work and reported it. Here are some links to those articles:

  • Mashable - Here's How Reddit's Communities Are Interconnected
  • Huffington Post - Reddit User Makes Beautiful, Explorable Graph Of Subreddit Community
  • Techno Buffalo - Redditor Visually Maps Subreddit Community In Visually Arresting, Interactive Graph
  • Crackajack.de - Visualization of the Reddit Network (German)
  • Animal - This Is What Reddit Really Looks Like
  • Trendhunter - This Interactive Data Map of the Reddit Universe is Responsive

If you'd like to write about any of my work, please contact me to set up an interview.