Reddit Graphics Trends

I reviewed 3 subreddits for the community norms assignment the last couple of weeks: r/dataisbeautiful, r/educationalgifs, and r/infographics. When I started, the communities had some COVID-19 related graphics, but otherwise, the topics were highly variable. The day I started watching closely and recording what I found for the assignment, the Minneapolis protests over George Floyd's killing began. It took a couple of days for police violence posts to become prominent; prominent in all of the communities except r/educationalgifs. This community is specific to explanatory, how-to gifs for educational purposes. The complexity of the type of graphic may have limited the ability for people to respond quickly, though it seems that an education-focused forum could benefit most from content addressing this topic. Within less than a week, COVID-19 graphics and a variety of other topics began to fill the top 3 lists again.

For the time frame that I captured the top 3 hot posts in each community, you can see the distribution of protest posts, highlighted in green, and pandemic posts, highlighted in orange, below.

The Space X launch shows up in the middle. In a year without so many major events, I wonder if that topic would have had more attention. Maybe not, though, as the topics seems to be all over the place except for the protests and pandemic.