We built a map like this at reddit a long time ago. The methodology was pretty straightforward -- we looked at subreddits that had the same links submitted and upvoted. We used the map to power the "similar subreddits" feature. Unfortunately it suffered from a lot of spam and things like getting linked to very NSFW subreddits, and we didn't have the manpower to fix it or curate it, so the feature died.
> I processed 176,178,986 unique comments that redditors left in years 2020 - 2021 and computed Jaccard Similarity between subreddits.<p>> Each dot on the map is subreddit. Two dots within the same cluster are usually close to each other if multiple users frequently leave comments on both subreddits.<p>More detail from the repo: <a href="https://github.com/anvaka/map-of-reddit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/anvaka/map-of-reddit</a>
The large "Asia" region contains, besides Asian topics (the right half of the region):<p>- Language learning communities<p>- Latin America (except Brazil which is in the RPG region because of r/TibiaMMO)<p>- Italy, Spain and Portugal (the latter is located between China and Japan for mysterious low-dimensionality representation reasons)<p>Other European countries with funny locations:<p>- Germany in the soccer region (as Gary Lineker once famously said "Football is a simple game: 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and, in the end, the Germans always win")<p>- France in the Canada region (Quebec strong)<p>- The Netherlands in the EDM region
There’s actually a subreddit for this map, but can’t find it in the map itself (too meta?) : <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MofR/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/MofR/</a>
Also surprised how big overwatch is relative to other games.<p>Bonus - My roommate works at Amazon and works part time with Andrei in some capacity (don’t know the full details), but anyway he has mentioned multiple times how cool and out of his way helpful Andrei is.<p>I bring this up because when someone of any notoriety is nice I think it’s really cool. I’ve met some ‘big’ tech people who definitely weren’t!
I've had another one of their sites [1] open in a tab for several months now. Whenever I find a new to me subreddit I find interesting I look it up on this site to see what else is in the vicinity topic wise.<p>[1] <a href="https://anvaka.github.io/sayit" rel="nofollow">https://anvaka.github.io/sayit</a>
I recognize this URL because I’ve been using this:<p><a href="https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/" rel="nofollow">https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/</a><p>It’s a searchable and visual graph of subreddits, mindmap style.
Original Show HN from author a year ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624879" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624879</a>
I'm happy and amused that KerbalSpaceProgram, NASA, SpaceX and Astronomy are placed under "Travel" and "Finance".<p>Maybe that's where they should be.
Linux under programming next to science and graphic design.<p>Microsoft and Windows 10 in netsec(!?) along with Facebook.<p>Google and Apple occupying a sea of banal self referential subs and consumption. Amazon is there, too just super small.<p>Very interesting.
Its surprising how often I was already visiting a clique of sub-reddits. Even more surprising how much I was missing out on similar sub-reddits. This visualization is really a discovery tool I needed.
Jojo* appears to be a country of refugees from the Anime region, who've settled in the general gaming region.<p>*Hopefully before anyone searches it on the map -- it appears that r/jojo was taken by some singer/actress. I was referring to the anime "Jojo's bizarre adventure," which has a capital of "r/shitpostcrusaders."
I wonder how the broader categories were selected. I thought it could be the largest/most connected node on each cluster but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I feel like these dots are so small, you have to zoom in and out constantly to go over the map... would it be possible to now take those dots and turn them into blocks that together make up 100% of the category they currently belong to? Like counties within a state
Back in 2016 I did a similar approach to calculate related users: one using graph similarity (<a href="https://minimaxir.com/2016/05/reddit-graph/" rel="nofollow">https://minimaxir.com/2016/05/reddit-graph/</a> , albeit the embeds broke) and another using jaccard similarity (like this viz) with a different approach to visualization which IMO turned out easier to interpret than a graph-based approach (<a href="https://minimaxir.com/2016/06/reddit-related-subreddits/" rel="nofollow">https://minimaxir.com/2016/06/reddit-related-subreddits/</a> )
There's lots that's interesting to me about this but one is how links provided by subreddits themselves might or might not reflect actual related topics. There's a couple of subs I'm familiar with that have relatively large related subreddits I wasn't aware of before, that aren't linked to or mentioned. Maybe in some cases there's political histories I'm unaware of?<p>The new reddit design is so problematic in so many ways. So many of the "related subreddits" sidebars (all?) are just eliminated in the redesigned site.
Great map. I suggest to paint active subreddits as bright circles and stale ones as dim circles, so the map would look like Europe viewed from satellite at night.
My methodology for discovery/linking subreddits when I did a big crawl was to look at the subreddit description and find links to other subreddits. I think that was less prone to the issues that other commenters are reporting.
this the metaverse, I mean, a metaverse, and maybe a VR 3d equivalent of this is the way to go? Curated and weighted as the user wants, not how the advertisers want...<p>I feel like in a social environment, Just because you don't find everything you want immediately is a feature, not a bug, like getting off in a part of town you don't know and talking to a person you didn't expect. In hindsight, "11 year old explore the city me" never left - still fun 30+ years later
Can this map be better understood as groupings of <i>users</i>? It seems that a lot of the categories that are polyphyletic so to speak - programming grouped with science, Italy and Spain between China and Japan - make sense if you just think of them as overlapping groups of users.<p>More specifically, the groupings would be user accounts (this distinction is important for understanding Porn Island).
how are the edges determined? i saw relative proximity is user interaction overlap, but there are discrete edges too if you click on a subreddit.<p>i'm curious because i would like to go another step and see how many hops it takes to get from A->B
A few years back I saw something similar where subreddits were presented like a tree, based on topics (and popularity, I think). Made it easy to drill down to interesting niche subreddits.<p>Haven't been able to find it since.
Who knew that science and teaching were a subset of programming?<p>Feels like something fundamental is wrong with the methodology. It appears they gave up on the large subreddits, perhaps because they were linked to everything.
I don't know why but my brain interpreted this as "Map of GitHub" and I was rather surprised that there was a GitHub repository for just GIFs and I hadn't known about it.
Browsing this as a map was entertaining, and I don’t even use Reddit.
Maybe this is a good application of the “metaverse”. Spacial association between communities.
reddit actively shadowbans comments and all kinds of user created content.<p>It was really surprising to me that they'd be shadowbanning comments I would make to reply to other people in already buried (controversial) threads.
The bulk of the groups are labeled, but the sections of "NSFW Island", I'll call it, aren't. Is there an explanation of the grouping? Some of the groups make sense (celebs, indian-themed) but I can't make heads or tails of the others.