Analysis of Reddit’s /r/popular
This post was adapted from the original Reddit post.
In light of Reddit’s release of /r/popular, I wanted to get a sense for exactly which subreddits were being filtered out. The admins apparently decided to not release a list of those filtered subreddits just yet.
Approach
9,000 posts worth of metadata (mainly subreddit, domain, and author) was gathered from both /r/all and /r/popular for every possible time span until Reddit stopped returning fresh results. After that, a straightforward comparison was used to generate the chart above. NSFW posts were excluded for the purpose of generating this chart.
Note: This was whipped together in a couple of hours. And, as a disclaimer, I am not intending for this post to be politically motivated.
Resources
A full mongoexport of the raw data is available here
Here is the full list of subreddits that are, as of today, not appearing on /r/popular.
Top 5 filtered from /r/popular:
- The_Donald
- AdviceAnimals
- leagueoflegends
- DotA2
- Overwatch
Finally, here is the full list of subreddits that were only seen on /r/popular, meaning they are likely to see a slight boost in visibility. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they don’t appear on /r/all – they just weren’t seen when the sample was taken.
Top 5 only seen on /r/popular:
- Watchexchange
- SweatyPalms
- ForHonorSamurai
- starwarsspeculation
- vsauce