Which developer subreddit has the most engaged community?
I'm a relatively new redditor who's been active for around two years. I've recently started posting more frequently and noticed that some subreddits seem to have higher engagement than others. As a data enthusiast, I decided to investigate by examining the subreddits I follow and assessing their engagement levels.
The primary goal of this analysis was to determine which subreddits have the most engaged communities. The number of subscribers can be a misleading metric, similar to YouTube subscribers, so I focused on upvotes per post.
I analyzed the top 50 posts from the past month in each subreddit, considering both upvotes. I used Python for the data processing and to speed it up, I got help from GPT-4 to code nicer, zoomable plots, etc.
Subreddits I follow:
- r/programming (5.3M members)
- r/webdev (1.6M members)
- r/learnprogramming (3.8M members)
- r/reactjs (338k members)
- r/javascript (2.3M members)
- r/node (228k members)
- r/learnjavascript (222k members)
- r/qualityassurance (25k members)
- r/softwaretesting (22k members)
- r/coding (490k members)
I first plotted the raw data:
Since the subreddits have a varying number of members, I needed to account for this when comparing engagement levels. To do so, I calculated the average number of upvotes per post and divided it by the total number of subreddit members.
I think that this shows a much better picture of which subreddits are more or less engaged with posts. For example, I find it super interesting to see how low r/javascript sits.
However, this is still not fair for bigger subreddits since the smaller subreddits are impacted more by outliers. We can see this by having smaller subreddits like r/QualityAssurance and r/softwaretesting so high up. To address this issue, I categorized the subreddits into three groups:
- Subreddits with fewer than 100.000 members
- Subreddits with between 100.000 and 1.000.000 members
- Subreddits with more than 1.000.000 members
Then, I got the following results:
Conclusion
My conclusion from all this is that r/QualityAssurance and r/webdev has the most engaged community out of these subreddits.
What are your thoughts on these findings?
The scripts used in this analysis can be found on Github.
Btw, since all these scripts are super simple, I'm thinking to create a small web app from this where you can compare subreddits and see engagement between any subreddits. What do you think? Would that be helpful?
P.S. I'm also working on an open source tool that speeds up creating automated tests by 95%. It's called Pythagora and with it, you can create automated integration tests with 80% code coverage in 30 minutes. You can see more details on the Github page - it would mean the world to me if you could give Pythagora a star on Github.