It’s a hot day in Amsterdam and writing is going slow. After reading this post on reddit, I ditched the writing for some playtime. In the post, /u/duckvimes_ charts the moderator overlaps between between /r/holocaust and a bunch of racist subreddits. The case is super interesting and the visualization very well done, but I thought that one could generalize the approach and create a map of reddit by looking at how subreddits’ moderators overlap. So I quickly wrote three scripts:

  • A script that gets the 10.000 most polular subreddits according to the GET_subreddits_popular API call.
  • A script that gets the moderator list for each of these subreddits
  • A script that generates a bipartite graph file containing all subreddits and moderators and connections between them

You can download a GDF file containing the 3000 most subscribed to subreddits file here.

reddit_map

To generate the visualization above (click for larger image, here’s a PDF), I used gephi‘s MultiMode plugin to transform the bipartite graph (which contains both subreddits and users) into a monopartite graph that connects two subreddits if they share a moderator; the more mods they share, the higher the link weight. In the visualization below, node size indicates number of subscribers and color the created date (blue => yellow => red indicates older to younger). Enjoy. (And now back to writing.)

Post filed under method, reddit, social networks, softwareproject, visualization.

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