An updated analysis on the upvote to comment ratio in here and on the rest of Reddit
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Post got removed last time I posted it due to having m00ns on the title I guess and there's been no answer from the mods about it, so I'll try one more time. TLDR: Jump to the conclusion and it's there. 2 days ago I made this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/p1e81z/an_analysys_on_upvotescomments_ratio_a_side/ I attemped to make an analysis on the overall upvote/comment ratio on the Top, Hot and New sections on other subs and compare it to the ratio found on this sub. This post took me hours to make, the reason I made it is because I've been wanting to get into data science and I'm also learning Python, so I'm just messing around practicing a bit and because of that feel free to criticize anything you think I've done wrong. Introduction In this post I'll post updated data with even more subs, now I have a list of 161 subs all the way from 30m subs down to 300k or so subs. I wrote a basic Python script using Reddit's API to let me navigate through thousands of posts and collect their number of upvotes and comments. Here's how I organized this: My logic was using the top 50 posts of all time, the last 20 hot posts (because above that it's not really important and we start to run into a lot of relatively new posts) and the last 500 new posts. From this I got a ratio of upvotes/comments using the sum of both comments and upvotes and dividing them. My choice of subs were subs with finance content similar to this sub and then just random subs, I also color coded the Excel sheet with the following pattern: The resulting sheet is this one, sorted by subscribers, descending order.
What does this ratio mean anyway? It could either mean:
It's up to us to decide which case aplies to which sub! Top 50 posts of all time This is the resulting sheet when we sort it by the ratio In this case, r/CryptoCurrency ranks 135th out of 161 total subs analyzed. That means that even our posts of all time sit on a lower ratio than most subs. If we compare it only to subs in the finance sector though, we rank 12th our of 22, so just about in the middle. In comparison to, we have:
What this data means, in my understanding, is that even in our most upvoted posts of all time, we still have a fucking lot of comments, especially considering that most of the finance subs below us like r/dot, r/solana, r/nanocurrency are subs with much less subscribers, so their most upvotes posts have much less upvotes and it's easier for them to have more comments, which results in a smaller ratio. If we were to weigh in the subscriber number by dividing the ratio by the subscriber amount, r/CryptoCurrency would rank 20th, only above r/wallstreetbets and r/personalfinance, which, not coincidentally are much larger subs. The #1 sub considering sub size is r/Chainlink, which is one of the smaller subs with only 63k members. Hot (20 posts) In this case we'll be looking at data from the last 20 posts on Hot. And oh wow, r/CryptoCurrency ranks 157th out of 161 subs. That's very low. In the finance sector we are also within the bottom 3. Comparison to other subs:
Comparison with weights by subscribers: We then rank again 157th overall and bottom 3rd in our sector. But this time around, we have:
What this data shows to me is that WE DON'T UPVOTE POSTS. People comment on posts a lot, think about it. The average post on Hot here has about 1.58 comments for every upvote, that's insane. What this might mean we'll discuss later in the conclusion. For now, let's move forward to the posts in New. New (last 500 posts) Once again, r/CryptoCurrency is at the very bottom, we rank 156th out of 161. In our finance sector, we rank now bottom 2nd, only above r/retirement, which man, isn't really a good sub to have in this list but it's too fucking late now. Anyway, we have, in comparison to other subs:
When we add weights to the subscriber number: (we still rank 156th)
What does this all mean? This means that for the average post in New, there are 1.67 comments for every upvote, people here sure like to comment! Besides that, this means that we are very low in the upvote/comment scale, what this implies will be discussed in the conclusion. Other analysis I generated this simple table as well, it looks a bit complicated but it's not that much. My logic was wanting to analyze how we compare to the average ratios for each sector. So for example, the average Top post ratio for all subs analyzed is 30.78 upvotes for every comment. Then I used r/CryptoCurrency numbers and divided them by these values seen below, by sector: And now in percentages: What this means is that in our New posts, for example, we have a ratio that's only 14.13% of the average ratio of the sector. What's interesting to see is that the finance sector in general seems to upvote less or comment more, depending on what you believe this ratio implies. In comparison to all subs, we have only 3.79% of the average ratio in New and 3.21% in Hot, 31.46% for Top posts. Below there are some graphs where I tried to see if there's a linear correlation between the ratio and subscribers numbers, but there seems to be none, since the R^2 values are very low. Conclusion First of all, godamn this post took me more than 4 hours to make, didn't think it'd take this long lol So, what does this mean? Of course this sub upvotes A LOT LESS than other subs in general, but why? Idea #1: This comes down to the fact that we have moons, of course, people are less inclined to upvote other comments and comment more in the hopes that their comments get highlighted in a very good upcoming post and they get a lot of upvotes themselves. Idea #2: Users participate more in general, this metric isn't bad and actually shows a very high level of engagement in the sub with a lot of upvotes/downvotes in the new section which actually contributes to high quality content in the front page. Idea #3 (my opinion): A combination of both of the ideas above, there are moon farmers which go around like crazy commenting on anything very fast without even reading the posts, which I've seen happen, on posts that are comedy, comments like "Wow OP that's very cool, this is the first step to adoption" while the post was literally a joke about how slow transactions are and how 2 people would be waiting 30 minutes in a store waiting for a BTC transaction to occur lol. But also at the same time this actually promotes a more competitive enviroment and less mindlessly upvoting a post just because and it actually filters a bit more what get's seen by other in the frontpage. What's your opinions on this, agree with me? Any other viewpoints? Interesting comments or insights on the data? submitted by /u/whatthefuckistime |
