The Reddit Project
Reddit is a social news aggregate.
It is a website that is run by users who share links and media from all over the Internet, filtering submissions into specific categories/topics.
These categories exist in the form of subreddits.
What is a subreddit?
Subreddits (forums) are communities of people from across the world connecting and discussing the subreddit’s specific subject.
For example, the subreddit r/aww shows adorable photos of animals.
The subreddit r/movies is dedicated to movie news and conversation.
There is a large number of subreddits (>100k) that tailor to hobbies, from popular to niche.
Click here to search for a hobby/interest. A community likely already exists.
If it does not, a community can be easily created to host materials pertaining to the subject.
What is the Reddit Project?
The Reddit Project is an academic study that was created by Brandon Grisham.
It serves as a data-collection project utilizing specialized software and Reddit’s public API (PRAW). The programed script harvests information from Reddit every day, converting it for use in an organized database.
The database collection allows for various forms of data analysis, which provides numerous levels of insight into the daily interests of Internet users.
Below is a link to Brandon Grisham’s abstract, giving an introduction to the fundamentals of the project.
Abstract
Below is a link to the official publication of the project, which was featured in Mississippi State University’s Spring 2020 Undergraduate Research Symposium. Details can be found at page 10, 16, and 58.
Research Symposium
What is this page for?
This page serves as a platform to share results from the study.
Given the sensitive nature of some of the collected material, several elements have been omitted.
This page also does not reveal everything that the study is working toward, as most of the data analysis requires a longer time-frame of data collection.
This page mainly serves to showcase information that that Brandon Grisham finds interesting.
Gauging the interests of other Internet users holds significant value.
The results can also be surprising.
Listed below are various materials from the Reddit Project that Brandon Grisham has made public:
Weekly Comment Count
Weekly Post Count
Weekly Subscriber Growth
- Reddit Subscriber Growth : (02/24/2020 – 03/01/2020)
- Reddit Subscriber Growth: (03/09/2020 – 03/15/2020)
- Reddit Subscriber Growth: (04/01/2020 – 04/07/2020)
Here are results that fall outside of the work of the study, but are interesting nonetheless:
