Reddit has been in the news a lot lately. Much of the coverage so far has focused on how the company’s new pricing policies have impacted small third-party developers, and with them the very large communities they supported with apps built on the once-free Reddit API. These policies — primarily a very high fee for use — have forced many indie developers to shut their apps down. There’s been significant backlash culminating in a substantial number of moderators locking down their communities last month and some even coordinating “indefinite blackouts” until their demands have been met.

A new subreddit is born every minute, and many become active and thriving communities within a short period of time. Thirty-seven communities started in the past 1.5 years are now featured among the site's top thousand communities today. Thirty-five of those had fewer than one million members as of July. As a reference point, the subreddit with the largest community is r/funny (#15), which was started 15 years ago and has nearly 50.5M members today. Ahead of r/funny is r/diablo4 (#4), created long before the game was released (?) and now ranked fourth in activity despite having a community size of only 736K. This all has interesting implications for natural language models like ChatGPT and Bard, since many have been using Reddit content as a significant part of their training corpora. (This could also explain why these models sometimes respond in random or startling ways.)

Looking at the data further, it seems many of these relatively small yet highly engaged communities are formed around games (eg r/HyruleEngineering and r/HonkaiStarRail), tech and machine learning (eg r/midjourney and r/ChatGPT), and current events (eg r/RussiaUkraineWar2022 and r/OceanGateTitan).

Among all subreddits including ones with larger memberships, games, ask, meme, and advice featured prominently. Below is a bar chart that shows the most common words (specifically lemmas) found in the top thousand subreddit names along with the corresponding subreddits in the tooltip. Bear in mind that many subreddits have names that don’t contain the words in the chart. For example, the actual number of game-related subreddits far exceeds the count of 27 in the chart for “games/gaming”. This bar chart does not reflect community size nor rank.

For most Reddit users, the results above might not be all that surprising. What’s somewhat surprising is just how many unique interests are represented among the top subreddits. If you’re curious, here’s a list of the other words pulled as lemmas from community names.

And even more surprisingly, a few are being used as mechanisms for navigating regimes or organizing around sociopolitical issues. Take, for example, r/WorkReform (#313), a community started last year that is rallying to “fight for a good quality of life for everyone who sells their labor!” with labor organizations like SEIU and AFL-CIO officially among their membership. Or r/tjournal_refugees(#515), “a place for ex-users of the Russian news aggregator TJournal.ru, which went out of service on September 10, 2022 following pressure from the Russian government”. And r/ukraine (#38), a tightly-moderated subreddit created to “amplify Ukrainian voices”. There are substantive posts in each of these communities daily, some of which are calls to action.

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There are so many subreddits out there, seemingly a community for everyone and every niche interest. And if that community does not yet exist, you could easily create and cultivate it -- to find dank memes, organize reform, or something else yet to be discovered.