Graphs that explain the internet…. Buzzfeed

Todd Schneider tracks the Reddit front-page, the stories that reach it, and the stories in pages two, three, four, and beyond. Unsurprisinly (to me) the Reddit front page is far from ‘automatic’ but has a decent level of editorial control, as can be seen from the step-change in the graph showing the position of the Top 100 posts hour by hour.

That got me wondering: if a post is on reddit’s second (or third, or fourth) page, what are the chances that it’ll make it to the first page? reddit shows 25 posts per page by default, and at some point I saw my post was at the #26 rank – the very top of the second page, only one spot away from making it to the front page! At that point it seemed inevitable that it would make it to page one… or was it? Of course it did make it to page one, peaking at #14, but I decided I’d investigate to see what I could learn about a reddit post’s chances of making it from the top 100 to the top 25.

Much to my surprise, I found out that reddit’s front pages are not a pure “meritocracy” based on votes, but that rankings depend heavily on subreddits. The subreddits themselves seem to follow a quota system that allocates certain subreddits to specific slots on pages one and two, and also prevents the front page from devolving entirely into animal gifs.