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Careful exploring 'Australia'
I thought 'Australia' would be bigger, honestly.
To elaborate, the australia-like island consists of very NSFW subreddits.

And yes, one should be careful with porn, consuming it in a bad way can lead to harmful coping mechanisms or problems with sex; seek help if you feel that you’re not in control.

There is no good way to “consume” porn. At best it’s pathetic, and it can be a whole lot worse, causing actual brain damage by rewiring reward circuits. It’s similar to alcohol in that respect: there is no safe dose.

I don’t say this to upset anyone, but anyone who is upset will benefit greatly from curbing the tendency toward denial and honestly asking “Am I an addict?”

All of this is of course backed by sound science right?
> At best it’s pathetic

This seems a personal opinion and unhelpful. Others might say avoiding porn is pathetic; I think this topic should be discussed without name calling.

I like the comparison to alcohol. I don’t drink but I wouldn’t shame those who do (unless they have a compulsion or they drink to avoid problems).

> This seems a personal opinion and unhelpful. Others might say avoiding porn is pathetic

No. Being a pathetic wanker who beats it to videos of things he lacks the agency to experience personally is in fact objectively shameful.

Oh, so it's one of those types of personal opinion.
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Brazil is apparently a suburb of RPG.
New Zealand is great too.
Why rule34 is on the main island instead of in "Australia"?
> I processed 176,178,986 unique comments that redditors left in years 2020 - 2021 and computed Jaccard Similarity between subreddits.

> Each dot on the map is subreddit. Two dots within the same cluster are usually close to each other if multiple users frequently leave comments on both subreddits.

More detail from the repo: https://github.com/anvaka/map-of-reddit

Incredibly interesting chart, or whatever the presentation is called.
Just, awesome. Recently I was trying to figure out how could explore in a more "natural" way new communities on reddit, well done
Why does rule 34 and most of the furry porn not fall onto porn island?
I guess the furries don't feel the need to create alt accounts for their porn
Same reason why there's a "gay island" I guess?
yeah, makes sense since so much anime content (or at least, a signifigant proportion more compared to western animation) already includes pretty explicit content. The line between something like Kill La Kill and kill la kill R34 is already razor thin.

part of it is also community. From a quick glance I recognize that r/hentai is in anime island instead of R34. But the moderation of r/hentai has (or used to have) many moderators from other anime subs, and some regular posters will alternate between r/hentai, r/manga, or r/animemes. That can play a part in which communities decide to form and comingle.

I feel like moderators should receive a weighted vote when identifying connections between subreddits. Two subs with identical moderator lists must be pretty similar right?
That doesn’t make sense when you realize mods uphold arbitrary politics of a sub, often even more than they are just janitors.
Black screen on Firefox Android.
Also Firefox (97.2.0 (Build #2015863827)) on Android, for me it's working.
Works for me on Firefox Nightly, Android and desktop versions.
I wonder how the broader categories were selected. I thought it could be the largest/most connected node on each cluster but that doesn't seem to be the case.
There’s actually a subreddit for this map, but can’t find it in the map itself (too meta?) : https://www.reddit.com/r/MofR/ Also surprised how big overwatch is relative to other games.

Bonus - My roommate works at Amazon and works part time with Andrei in some capacity (don’t know the full details), but anyway he has mentioned multiple times how cool and out of his way helpful Andrei is.

I bring this up because when someone of any notoriety is nice I think it’s really cool. I’ve met some ‘big’ tech people who definitely weren’t!

The subreddit is linked of you click _improve this map_at the bottom right.
Jojo* appears to be a country of refugees from the Anime region, who've settled in the general gaming region.

*Hopefully before anyone searches it on the map -- it appears that r/jojo was taken by some singer/actress. I was referring to the anime "Jojo's bizarre adventure," which has a capital of "r/shitpostcrusaders."

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No categories for science??
Science has a large cluster in North Programming, and a cluster in Eastern Finance. The search is pretty good.
It appears above Programming when you start zooming in. Unintuitive order to put things, but it's there.
That whole big Australia-like continent at the bottom is "for science"...
how are the edges determined? i saw relative proximity is user interaction overlap, but there are discrete edges too if you click on a subreddit.

i'm curious because i would like to go another step and see how many hops it takes to get from A->B

I'm happy and amused that KerbalSpaceProgram, NASA, SpaceX and Astronomy are placed under "Travel" and "Finance".

Maybe that's where they should be.

You can learn about managing finances in KSP Career mode I guess...
Coincidentally by building fully automated tourist ships...
I feel like these dots are so small, you have to zoom in and out constantly to go over the map... would it be possible to now take those dots and turn them into blocks that together make up 100% of the category they currently belong to? Like counties within a state
That's a nice idea. I do wonder if it could create some border problems, where there is a need to link to some non-neighbor states, but not through other states that would otherwise be linked/shared neighbors.

(I guess unless you wanted to render little overflights by airplanes or something)

I learned you can click on the nodes to see relationships FWIW
The large "Asia" region contains, besides Asian topics (the right half of the region):

- Language learning communities

- Latin America (except Brazil which is in the RPG region because of r/TibiaMMO)

- Italy, Spain and Portugal (the latter is located between China and Japan for mysterious low-dimensionality representation reasons)

Other European countries with funny locations:

- Germany in the soccer region (as Gary Lineker once famously said "Football is a simple game: 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and, in the end, the Germans always win")

- France in the Canada region (Quebec strong)

- The Netherlands in the EDM region

Hungary is with the strategy games.
And HongKong is under Wtf.. makes sense I guess.
>Portugal (the latter is located between China and Japan for mysterious low-dimensionality representation reasons)

could that have a real world reason given that Macau used to be a Portuguese colony as well as Brazil hosting the largest Japanese diaspora population in the world?

Seems to be pure chance. r/brasil and others are in a very different place in the graph, and none of the subreddits related to r/portugal are connected to any of the Japanese/Chinese subreddits in the graph.
Unlikely, because virtually nobody in Macau speaks Portuguese anymore, and Reddit is not well known in Japan. Various Japan-related subreddits are very popular, but they're populated by English speakers living in Japan, travelling to Japan, etc.
Cats contains the plant related reddits, and is tied to them via r/CatsAndPlants (fair enough). It visibly looks like plants are also connected via r/michaelbaygifs, but that is only because of really odd placement for r/UnexpectedThugLife.

It would be nice if the shown links were not restricted to a single "country", as I bet r/dogsandplants (which is part of Cats) is tied to a bunch of dog reddits, but those are not shown.

My methodology for discovery/linking subreddits when I did a big crawl was to look at the subreddit description and find links to other subreddits. I think that was less prone to the issues that other commenters are reporting.
We built a map like this at reddit a long time ago. The methodology was pretty straightforward -- we looked at subreddits that had the same links submitted and upvoted. We used the map to power the "similar subreddits" feature. Unfortunately it suffered from a lot of spam and things like getting linked to very NSFW subreddits, and we didn't have the manpower to fix it or curate it, so the feature died.
Sad to hear this wasn't able to make it into GA.

But the link-relationship methodology is interesting (similar to something like PageRank through backlinks).

But it's not the methodology I'd have initially gravitated towards.

My first instinct would be relations based on subscription overlap. This seems like it should group commonalities based on the user interests. This may also have alleviated some of the SPAM issues.

Though it would have been interesting to see both approaches merged together.

We may have tried other methodologies as well, I honestly don't remember. I feel like subscription overlap was something we at least talked about, but maybe not.
That would not produce anything close to this. Is the goal to find similar subreddits, or find other non-similar subreddits the person may like? The map by OP is grouped by categories, which is quite a bit different than just interest. Even for recommendation system, I don't think it quite works here due to how extremely wide reddit is. Something like Steam or Spotify can use it, but reddit has everything from porn to cities to games. Just because I love Portal and I'm from Vancouver doesn't mean someone else who likes Portal will care about Vancouver, or vice versa.
Yes, but the majority of /r/Steam users are not subscribed to /r/Vancouver (or whatever the Vancouver subreddit is). I'd wager a guess there is a much more significant overlap with related subreddits such as /r/pcgaming.
I think this is how Last.fm works (and it works quite well!)

The weirdness in disparate interests is smoothed out by having a large sample size.

I'm trying to find details of the algorithm. In the meantime, here's an interview with the inventor of AudioScrobbler, which merged with Last.fm to provide its recommendations system: https://www.wired.com/2012/11/richard-jones-scrobbling

> That would not produce anything close to this

Well, have you read the methodology used by this map?

> Each dot is a subreddit. Two dots within the same cluster are usually close to each other if multiple users frequently leave comments on both subreddits.

So it's not exactly about subscribers, but it's the same idea, which proves your refutation wrong.

Shame that Musk didn’t opt to buy Reddit instead. The only tech company more mismanaged than Twitter over the last decade was Reddit. Not to mention their blatant bias and abuse of power.
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How about amking an icon next to every single post which is a link to summary page of every post of that URL, ever.

I've been a reddit user for 15 years.

I have a fairly good memory. So many reposts from even years ago.

Fine, if nobody had seen such post prior, but an indicator of just how frequently a reposted URL is useful, though antithetical to $model.

If you're on old reddit, you can click the "Other Discussions" button to see every time the URL has been submitted. You can also just go to reddit.com/duplicates/$linkID

Or you can go to reddit.com/$URL (<- They hate it when I tell people this because it's a feature that I wrote 15 years ago as a URL rewrite in the load balancer that they have to maintain as they change load balancers)

Fun fact: That feature exists because I made reddit's co-founder Steve write it for me in exchange for a place to sleep.

Thanks for that feature, I love using it to see discussion of the same content in different communities. It really helps make reddit feel like the front page of the internet, with multiple communities commenting on what's going on every day. If there was one thing I wish was improved about it it would be canonicalization, so that m.wikipedia.com and wikipedia.com articles are connected, or youtube.com and youtu.be links
Super familiar, and thank you for that...

Sorry that I can't stand new reddit.

I think that there should be a visual indicator maybe from green - yellow - red background or something based on the frequency of reposts etc...

I consume reddit for new stuff...

After being a user for literally 15 years. I am ready to delete my account.

reddit actively shadowbans comments and all kinds of user created content.

It was really surprising to me that they'd be shadowbanning comments I would make to reply to other people in already buried (controversial) threads.

As a Cambridge resident, I appreciate /r/Boston and /r/CambridgeMA being placed in the "Survival" category!
Baltimore is as well, which is understandable. I'm surprised it's so far from idiotsInCars.
Who knew that science and teaching were a subset of programming?

Feels like something fundamental is wrong with the methodology. It appears they gave up on the large subreddits, perhaps because they were linked to everything.