Reddit Tracking
I occasionally post on Reddit and the other day, I posted that admitting you’re wrong is a sign of growth, not weakness and it got pretty popular. Then it got deleted because apparently, the mods thought it was common sense. I disagree, but it’s their group so fair enough.
So then I thought it would have been interesting to see how the post’s popularity changed over time. But I don’t think Reddit keeps track of that kind of information. So I wrote a super hacky script to do just that. Then I ran it whenever I made another post and eventually made a post (about the difference between addictive and fun) that was moderately popular. I tracked it over 24 hours (with some breaks because the script crashed a few times; like I said, it’s super hacky) and that’s the blue graph.
So then I thought it would be kinda neat to post a graph to Reddit that tracked the popularity of the post itself! Unfortunately, images can’t be changed once posted. But if you post a link to an article with the image, Reddit extracts the image. So if you update an image in an article, would the image update on the Reddit post? I don’t know. But that’s what this blog post is attempting to find out.
May 22nd, 2020 at 2:02 pm
This is excellent. A major weakness i find with the platform is poor metrics for tracking community engagement. This would appear to challenge the status quo. Seeing many posts tracked this way over time, could provide insight on reddits algorithm for promoting posts that say, get a minimum threshold of traction in the first hour, or something. Really neat!
May 22nd, 2020 at 8:00 pm
Thanks! And thanks for posting on my humble blog. I think you might be the first person to comment on one of my blog posts in years. I mostly just use this as a sort of a public diary for myself so it’s kinda fun to see someone post on it.