Using Reddit’s JSON API to analyze post popularity

R-bloggers 2014-09-15

(This article was first published on Revolutions, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Graduate student Clay McLeod decided to find out what makes a post on the social-sharing site Reddit popular. These are the questions he seeks to answer:

What’s in a post? Reddit pulls in around 115 million unique visitors each month, amassing a staggering 5 billion page views per month. For a long time, I’ve wondered what factors draw people to certain Reddit posts while shunning others - does it have to do with the time of day a post is submitted? Do certain users have a monopoly on the most viewed posts? What about text posts vs. links?

Reddit provides a JSON API to download Reddit data, and Clay created this Python script to download a CSV file with one record per post, with information about its domain, subreddit, upvotes, downvotes, numbr of comments etc. This file can then easily be analyzed with R:

If you've spent any time on Reddit none of the analysis will be very surprising: images generate a lot of votes, NSFW posts are more popular, etc. But I'm interested to see what can do make with data from Reddit.

Clay Mcleod: What's in a Post, Part 1 (via KDNuggets)

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