Reddit Popularity, and Power Laws
Reddit Statistics For 2024 (Demographics, Usage & Traffic Data)
https://dashboard.laterforreddit.com/analysis/
Reddit seems to be commonly overlooked in social media analyses, as classes like Networks discuss Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram more frequently. Reddit is unique in that it has many individual subreddits that act as their own networks. These individual networks have their own ties between users on that subreddit, and links to external subreddits, and external sites. The first link above gives statistics on Reddit posts, what makes them popular, and what popular posts have in common. The second link provides a way to analyse the best time of day to post for maximum updoots.
Looking at these trends, we can see that for r/all the best time to post is Thursday at 12pm. This is likely related to the times with most user traffic, but also shows that popular posts share some characteristics. By copying a popular post’s strategy your post may be more likely to gain upvotes. The fraction of posts with a certain amount of upvotes likely follows a power law a/b^c, like other social media we have discussed. Analyzing post votes versus time also shows that after a certain threshold a post is more likely to gain an additional upvote because Reddit strengthens the rich-get-richer effect in a few ways. One is by displaying the amount of upvotes, which increases the likely hood of a user interacting with that post and copying other’s positive reviews. Another way Reddit strengthens the rich-get-richer effect is by showing posts in ‘hot’ or ‘all’ once they gain a certain amount of popularity. By reaching the ‘hot’ or ‘all’ threshold many more users are exposed to the post and will interact more and more with it.