The head and tail of Reddit

Reddit is the successor of Digg. It’s a crowdsourced news aggregation utility with commenting. It contains communities of sorts, hidden deep inside. This is the useful stuff.

Reddit has a few pretty good utilities that are written on top of their API. One of them is stattit. Another one is the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES).

As with any site, there’s the head, and then there’s the long tail. And the long tail is long on Reddit.

Based on figures from stattit, the largest subreddit (sub) is r/funny, a forum dedicated to things that are funny. It peaks at ~27,000 online users per hour, with some ~2.5 million subscribers.

The tail is very long. The 5000th sub is r/realtimestrategy, with 3 online users in one hour, and 597 subscribers. There are some 12,783 subs listed.

The RES can cause a very different Reddit experience, with incredible quality in the long tail. This is the deep reddit.

The top 20 subs are popular, and contain extremely popular content. More than 50% of the links on r/funny go to imgur, an image hosting site. Photos are extremely quick to consume and are a great commercial filler. This is the lowest common denominator.

By contrast, less than 3% of the links submitted on r/physics are from imgur. Same for r/tech. Imgur doesn’t make the list for r/economics. Deep content lurks in the deep reddit. The RES enables one to surface much of it, for a rapid digest of what’s new.

Stattit exposes just how deep it goes.

Go deep and explore.

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I’m Christopher Berry.
I’m at Authintic.