Original post with HD graphics: <a href="http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolution-of-reddit-through-post-data/" rel="nofollow">http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio...</a>
Ugh, I really hate stacked area graphs. Usually you can display the same information in a much more readable format by using a multi-colored or dotted line graph with a legend, and use logarithmic scaling to space out all the crap on the bottom.<p>The main problem with these stacked graphs is spikes/dips on the bottom cause everything stacked on top of it to distort in weird ways, making things very difficult to see.<p>Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total site growth over time, which would be interesting and relevant.
What a missed opportunity reddit was. If it hadn't turned into a meme/image site it could have been much more interesting. I had an ongoing pattern of unsubscribing from the different sections one by one as I get tired of memes, images, and general low-content posting. Until there was really nothing left.
Wow. Reddit is that young? It feels as if it has been around forever.<p>I'm not so sure about the image overload thing. Maybe that is just a symptom of another problem. IMO, the standard settings of the main page should be "fixed". It would be nice if you saw posts from a dozen or so _random_ subreddits as a standard setting, instead of the current colorful goo mixed from the big catchall subreddits.
It's interesting that /r/politics got a huge bump (looks to me to be about 75% increase in size) around the 2008 U.S. presidential election, but had no noticeable difference in 2012.
Good lord, what happened in mid 2009?! The reddit.com blue area spikes up for a month.<p>Edit: the original blogpost by Randy Olson says he doesn't know either.
Those who only take a cursory glance will assume that Reddit started as a porn site, with nsfw dominating. This is of course contrary to how most of us remember it.<p>If you delve deeper, it is actually that Reddit started entirely without subs, and happened to mostly be programming related, with a smattering of politics.<p>nsfw was created because, much like with the TLD debate on the same topic, it was a content category that people wanted to separate. As the "subless" Reddit started to get noisy with mainstream topics, that's when people started fracturing off to /r/programming.