It's unfortunate you removed all the primary subreddits (or degree > 75), it makes a lot of the networks confusing (the gaming network, for example) because they seem to only show niche topics.
Agree on that point. Also, I believe you have an extremely useful data set here, but the visualization of it could be improved. My goal when looking at the graph is to discover other subreddits that may be of interest, but this is very difficult to do in the current form.
Perhaps a way of inputting and highlighting subreddits of interest (as a short term solution)?
This is really well done! I would recommend putting the defaults back in and playing around with and finding a good value for "remove connections that have less than" using a number based on a percentage of the posts in sub instead of an arbitrary 8 connections.
For example, remove connections from /r/programming to subs that are cross referenced from /r/programming less than 5% of the time.
Not surprising that the drama bomb meta subreddits are the biggest connectors (TrueRedditDrama being the largest graphically).
I personally think the overall quality/SNR of the entire site would go up if meta subs (a sub who's sole purpose is to link to other subs) were banned outright. They don't seem to do anything but stir up strife and abuse.
> Not surprising that the drama bomb meta subreddits are the biggest connectors (TrueRedditDrama being the largest graphically).
The meta subreddits that are prominently featured are only so because the subreddits that have a high degree of interconnectedness were intentionally removed:
> Removed nodes with a degree greater than 75 (this was enough to get rid of every sub in the top 20 subreddits (by subscriber). Since these subs are likely to link to a wide variety of topics, an association with one of these subs is not particularly interesting to us.
This skews the graph towards subreddits (potentially, but not necessarily, meta subreddits) that are just under the arbitrary cutoff point. So all the very large, interconnected non-meta subreddits are missing, giving a skewed picture of the actual graph.
Because of this, even among meta subreddits, notable, extremely prominent ones are missing, like /r/SubredditDrama, /r/ShitRedditSays and /r/bestof.
/r/DailyDot and /r/TLDR are highly interesting meta subs linking to major posts of the previous day. As someone who doesn't subscribe to most defaults I'd miss the occasional interesting story without them.
And SubRedditDrama is perfect to brighten my day ;)
This analysis is slightly different than the study of cross-posed links. Here the content of posted URLs (not yet comments)is analyzed and subreddits are put into clusters within a search engine.
I really like the magnification effect. One of the things I don't like about these weighted graphs is that mousing to tiny targets can be a huge PITA. The magnification rectifies this.
This is really useful to me, I'm always wondering about specific subreddits that may interest me. Now I can actually find them. I think there may be other ways to present this information to help people discover subreddits of interest.
Can anyone find the cluster of technical/programming subreddits? Closest ones I see are the Startup hub, and java_help. I know they're in there somewhere though.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. Discovered that subreddit through r/ImGoingToHellForThis which is becoming more and more a racist subreddit. I asked there the same question and learned that American put freedom of speech before hate speech and racism (which is not the case in many other countries, France for example).
This is why you have the Tea party and other jokes in the US.
Reddit is following a clear "US" guiderule which is "whatever goes".
Not in the US as far as I know though and that's usually what Reddit takes as baseline. Though I think a case could be made banning them for vote brigading but that might create quite some drama considering the 2 big brigading subs (if you discount positive brigading of /r/bestof and /r/defaultgems) SRS and /r/guns are politically sensitive.
As opposed to "sarcastic" hate speech, like a joke you might hear on Tosh.0. These people really do believe the things they say, and they are intent on spreading their vitriol as far as they can.
I'm not sure what point you were trying to make, though. Unless you really didn't understand what I meant?
Also, canvas is faster in Chrome. For instance, here is one benchmark about layered canvases (sigma.js actually layers different canvases): http://jsperf.com/layered-canvases/9
So, it is actually "best viewed in Google Chrome", despite it is indeed standards compliant.
