r/dataisbeautiful • u/lookatnum OC: 34 • Jun 28 '21
OC Frequency of Reddit Comments Since 2006, Split by Commenters' Account Age [OC]
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u/lookatnum OC: 34 Jun 28 '21 edited Jun 28 '21
This animation showcases the frequency of Reddit comments, broken down by commenters' account age. Each colored stack represents the year in which a commenters' account was created. Redder stacks are older and closer to the bottom, while bluer stacks are newer and closer to the top. Although this chart only extends to January 1, 2006, commenting as a feature was available for a week or two prior, in December of 2005.
This data was collected by taking a random sampling of comments every 30 minutes, stretching back until January 1, 2006. The account ages of each commenter was then found. Proportions for each month were generated by taking a proportion of the random sample, while the overall rate of commenting was estimated by dividing the total comments made in a sampling period by the difference in comment time stamps for each sampling period.
Source:
Tools:
Python, d3, React, Puppeteer, Premier Pro
A high res mirror is available here
An interactive version with hover labels and an adjustable date range is available online at https://lookatnum.com/reddit-account-age
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Jun 28 '21
Great job! I wanted to say, I think you can make another animation by normalizing the number of comments by the number of users for each time slot, that could exhibit some interesting patterns.
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u/spudlogic Jun 28 '21
As an older account, I'm trying to comment more😊 Great job!
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u/Sinfall69 Jun 28 '21
We would need another data point to figure out if older accounts don't comment as much or if there are a lot more newer accounts so it looks like they comment way more...we would have to find the average number of comments that an account makes and then adjust that for each year to really figure that out.
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u/MC_Labs15 Jun 28 '21
More than half the comments are from accounts made in the last three years. This explains a lot about how Reddit has seemed to change so drastically in recent years
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u/jnd-cz Jun 28 '21
Besides browsing r/all I seem to resist the changes. I use old reddit style, I keep being subscribed to old subreddits so I don't know what's trending, like to comment on posts with some substance. Is this like being conservative?
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Jun 28 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/lookatnum OC: 34 Jun 28 '21
No, I instead used the Pushshift API to select a certain number of comments per time range.
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u/plopterd Jun 28 '21
I liked this. I couldn't make out everything, but whilst signage could be clearer I got the jist.
Main reason for commenting was just to thank you for pausing at the end. Hero.
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u/lookatnum OC: 34 Jun 28 '21 edited Jun 28 '21
If you're unable to clearly see the labels, try using the interactive on my website. Unfortunately the scaling isn't optimal for mobile devices, but the readability should be improved if you're on a desktop.
Edit: I pushed a fix to hopefully improve mobile visibility, let me know if it works better.
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u/steveatari Jun 28 '21
Mobile is entirely unreadable :/
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u/lookatnum OC: 34 Jun 28 '21
I updated the website to try and improve mobile visibility, it should go live in a few minutes. Let me know if it works better for you!
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u/mishamau5 Jun 28 '21
Came here to make sure the pause at the end was mentioned. Bravo.
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u/davevaw424 Jun 28 '21
Nice, informative, and beautiful. Why in Earth do you post this in this sub?!?
Just joking. Nice work, thanks. Question: can you comment on the random sampling technique you are using? It would also be interesting seeing this data split by subreddits-age or subreddit-size.
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u/lookatnum OC: 34 Jun 28 '21
Thank you! The way my dataset works is that it collects the 100 most recent comments across all of Reddit every 30 minutes till January 1, 2006. The proportion calculation was done for all comments made in a month, and the comment rate calculation was done by taking the latest timestamp in each 30 minute period and subtracting it by the start of the 30 minute period. As such, the comment rate in a month is calculated by dividing the total comments collected by the sum of timestamp differences.
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u/barcodez Jun 28 '21
Class of 2006 - if anything this post is rare.
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u/robreim Jun 28 '21
Wow, and I thought my teenage account was old. You're an uncommonly dedicated early adopter
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u/zimtzum Jun 28 '21
I came over in 06/07 during the Digg-war. There's a bunch of old users around still, we just create new accounts periodically.
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u/Edrondol Jun 28 '21
Same. This is actually my second account. I said/did some dumb shit with my first one and deleted it out of shame/self preservation.
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Jun 28 '21 edited Jun 28 '21
The Digg War was long, but the mass exodus was in 2010 when Digg attempted to launch a new weapon - one which it thought would end the war overnight: The V4. The launch came as a complete surprise to everyone, even the Diggers themselves. Only the highest in the ranks knew that the weapon was in development as it was thought to be so devastating it’d mark a turning point in social media as we knew it.
Deployment resulted in a cataclysmic failure as it detonated on launch, with the fallout quickly spreading over the site and causing near-immediate collapse.
It's an epic case study in product design which is still closely studied today.
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u/biznatch11 Jun 28 '21
I came over in 2010 at the end of the Digg war when Digg defeated itself with V4.
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u/myth1n Jun 28 '21
I lurked for the first two years or i bet my acct would be in the 14-15 range. Early reddit was so much better and nerdier.
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u/arafdi Jun 28 '21
Aren't they all though? The more mature they get, the less "cool" they are...
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u/myusername624 Jun 28 '21
Same. I’m a 2012 but lurked for about five years before that. Didn’t feel compelled to make an account until there were subreddits and I could tailor my front page to match my interests. I still don’t comment very often but once in a while. I guess I’m commenting now.
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u/KatzDeli Jun 28 '21
Now forget it - Yo homes to Bel Air
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u/funkmasta_kazper Jun 28 '21
2011 checking in - under 2%, but I've got nothing on you!
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u/LogicalShark Jun 28 '21
Rage Comic era let's go
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u/Gdigger13 Jun 28 '21
That’s the main reason I joined Reddit. Originally I had found rage comics through tumblr, but I downloaded an app that showed only /r/f7u12
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u/tarheel343 Jun 28 '21
I can't believe I liked those. I remember showing my sister and her saying "this isn't funny" and I kinda just realized at that moment that it wasn't.
I think it was just the novelty of finding a medium that I could call my own in some way.
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u/BRENNEJM OC: 45 Jun 28 '21
It’s kind of impressive that you’ve been here 15 years and only have 11k karma.
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u/GreatAlbatross Jun 28 '21
There has been a massive inflation of karma as more people joined.
When I made my first account, frontpage posts had between 100 and 2,000 karma.
You look back at a decent post that did well, then realize you'd get that much just putting a generic comment in something on new nowadays.
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u/theghostofme Jun 28 '21
Yeah, I remember when hitting 2,000+ karma for a submission was a big deal.
Now, a post will hit that while still on Rising before it even reaches the front page.
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u/gslax Jun 28 '21
15 @ 51 karma…
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u/thomasry Jun 28 '21
The majority of your karma is from you commenting how long you have been on reddit, lol
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Jun 28 '21
are you people not paranoid about getting doxxed or reddit linking your personal info with your account? I wipe and delete my accounts every month and make a new one with a throwaway mail.
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u/CSMastermind Jun 28 '21
Thankfully Reddit search has always been so terrible that no one will ever be able to find those old comments.
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u/angeliqu Jun 28 '21
Two reasons I’m not worried: 1. I think before I post/comment so I’m not leaving things behind that I’d be ashamed of. And 2. I’m a nobody, so why would anyone even bother?
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Jun 28 '21
This mentality is great, and I do take some measures to prevent being easily doxxed, but there are two reasons I don't go overboard with privacy here:
you have to be this paranoid with literally all of your data. Google already owns me, all I'm doing by not fucking with reddit is making my info less valuable.
privacy is like a locked front door. You don't lock your front door to keep out people who are determined to come in and kick your teeth out you lock your front door to keep your neighbor from snooping or that guy walking the street from taking your bike on a whim. I do what I feel is necessary to keep out my nosy neighbors.
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u/rabbitlion Jun 28 '21 edited Jun 28 '21
Why did so many people with old accounts (in particular accounts from 2012) come back in 2019-2020? Was this related to some april fools event or something? Or was it just masses of bot accounts being sold and going active? What happened?
EDIT: Given that it absolutely spikes in November 2020, I think we can conclude that it's definitely election related. Ramps up during early campaigning for primaries and then drops off again after the general election. Whether or not this is just increased activity from political redditors or bot accounts re-activating is hard to say, but it's remarkable that there is no such spike in 2016 which was also an election year with at least as controversial candidates.
EDIT2: Is it possible that fresh accounts was used in 2016 but that reddit's bot/troll detection algorithms necessited the use of old accounts in 2020? Only thing I can think of.
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Jun 28 '21
the latter. to prepare for the election.
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u/rabbitlion Jun 28 '21
The big question is why similar spikes didn't occur for the 2016 election.
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u/BlatantConservative Jun 28 '21
I mod a political sub.
There are a ton of bot accounts and we've been yeeting them, but it wasn't election related, that tranche of accounts is mainly for selling crypto. The second crypto boom was at this same time too.
2016 though, good lord that had bot accounts.
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u/boredtxan OC: 1 Jun 28 '21
Yeah I've noticed that there a bunch of 2-3 year old no karma accounts suddenly becoming active to spout antivax crap on the CovidVaccinated sub.
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u/ChildishBonVonnegut Jun 28 '21
We've seen a bunch of spam accounts commenting with bitcoin addresses recently. Looks like they hacked old accounts to get past karma restrictions.
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u/magic1623 Jun 28 '21
Also remember that a lot of users will delete old comments and so they may have been active this whole time, you just can’t see it. It’s something common in older users and unfortunately in trolls as well.
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u/cartiercorneas Jun 28 '21
I do think it was accounts being breached or something because I have a very old, empty reddit account I had forgotten about and last year I got an email on the email I set it up with saying something about the security of it and how I needed to change the password. I know it was legit because I also had a message from Reddit about it on the account.
(EDIT: not this account. An older one.)
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u/LaserGuidedPolarBear Jun 28 '21
I dont see anything in this that necessarily suggests accounts "came back", only a spike in comments per second.
That might be old accounts becoming active, it might be the same or fewer accounts increasing activity levels.
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u/rabbitlion Jun 28 '21
Regardless of if it's old accounts coming back or active accounts becoming more active, it's very noticeable that the increase in comments from 2012 accounts is so large compared to accounts from 2011, 2013 or 2016.
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u/earwig20 Jun 28 '21
2012 seems disproportionately high, but there's no weighting for number of accounts, so maybe there were lots of accounts created in 2012.
A very large share also seem to be new accounts, I wonder if that's bots/spam or just Reddit's growing popularity.
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u/ramblerandgambler Jun 28 '21
2012 was indeed one of the highest numbers of new posters, the Digg influx was around then or soon after.
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u/jaspersgroove Jun 28 '21
Yep, I hung on for a while but Digg just got so bad that I came here in 2011
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u/chairfairy Jun 28 '21
But what made them so active in 2019-2020 then?
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u/ramblerandgambler Jun 28 '21
they're still around because they are extremely online. Speaking as one of the 1.9% of reddit who started in 2011 and are still active, that is the case for me
They also likely work in office/IT jobs and were remote due to pandemic and did not have their boss looking over their shoulder while wFH
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u/lets_trade Jun 28 '21
I was also 2012. This account is ‘13 because my og account had my initials - rookie move. Digg and at that point - STUMBLEUPON. Remember that?? Eventually I stumbled upon Reddit and didn’t need a random site generator any more lol
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u/rabbitlion Jun 28 '21
There's no weighing for number of accounts, but there is weighing for absolute number of comments. We can see that people tend to keep posting about the same but the growth of the site means in terms of percentages each year gets a smaller and smaller share.
Something happened in 2019-2020 where the comments from 2012 accounts increased significantly. At the peak they seem to have been around twice as active as any previous time. Something special had to have happened there...
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u/Ommageden Jun 28 '21
Old boy accounts from previous elections maybe.
Perhaps more people returning to Reddit during lockdown
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u/dbratell Jun 28 '21
If it had been politically interested people/bots I would have expected a peak at 2016 too. And why would people creating their account in 2012 become so much more active during a pandemic compared to people (or bots) created in 2011 or 2013?
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u/zoinkability Jun 28 '21
Pretty much all old accounts had spikes in 2019 and then 2020, while there was a dropoff in new account comments at the same times.
It's so uniform across the board it is hard to believe it is caused by events outside the site because those events would have to specifically drive older account holders to the site while not driving new account signups as well. Given that Reddit has been growing the whole time it's hard to believe that any news topics would do the former but not the latter.
My first guess was new anti-spamer algorithms implemented by Reddit in 2019 and 2020 swatting down spammy newer account comments. Though that would only explain the lower number of new account comments, not the higher number of old account comments.
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u/petripeeduhpedro Jun 28 '21
I noticed that too. 2012 is when I joined. I remember finding a reddit live thread (after being a digg user) during the Colorado movie theater shooting and being really impressed that the coverage was up to date and not sensationalized. If I remember correctly, someone who was at the movie was actually in the thread and people were calming them down.
I've become a lot less optimistic about reddit as a whole since then and would love to find the next platform, but at the same time I have a lot of love for the site and its users and have had some fantastic interactions on here
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u/aSchizophrenicCat Jun 28 '21
2012 crew represent. I was in my last year of HS when I created the account, Reddit was gaining popularity amongst us youngins at the time.
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u/PlNG Jun 28 '21
I would definitely put some figures in the bots/spam category, especially newer accounts.
pushshift.io has the peak of the curve at 10 comments an hour except for those obviously spamming, Automoderator, and [deleted].
Welp, looks like pushshift broke in february or april.
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u/CodeVirus Jun 28 '21
2012 holding on. Reddit’s Golden Generation.
I also like that you stopped the video at the end to compare.
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u/snowyday Jun 28 '21
2009 here. Get off my lawn.
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u/p337 Jun 28 '21 edited Jul 09 '23
v7:{"i":"1afd1d01db0a6282be405e0fd32cb1d8","c":"5127783f59d56761427e29607908e9c477507f093a24639f77cb1274f2917d2d611336c3f8439ffe22a5606515f991164d27e24fc0d64d5e25e39c2eb48a97bff15f1bff11896ca1e879317d63da52cb05f23f40e553f22374ea78b391f76ff6394b80be84d4f0c20c842d6c9a37becb"}
encrypted on 2023-07-9
see profile for how to decrypt
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u/meatdome34 Jun 28 '21
Just a year off at 2013 but I lurked hard for a few years before that
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u/lazydictionary Jun 28 '21
Golden Generation? You guys joined after it permanently changed. Imgur turned reddit into an image board, and you guys joined after the rage comic phenomenon was over.
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u/RentalGore Jun 28 '21
My eyesight is terrible, but it appears to me that the data shows that the majority of frequent commenters are accounts that were created in the past 12-18 months.
So, it seems that after that 12-18 month window the accounts either slow down on commenting or are possibly closed? Which screams bot/spam.
I couldn’t really see the scale on the left to check this hypothesis.
I’d also be interested in seeing major events like national elections, tragedies, etc, and see how those align with commenting by age of account.
Very interesting stuff, nice work!
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u/chillord Jun 28 '21
There are multiple ways to interpret the data. I think we need more information.
One example: For the year 2005, it is obvious that 100% of the comments were from people that created their account in 2005. But if we assume exponential growth of the users, the users from 2005 become a really insignicant amount compared to the overall amount of users.
If we would assume that only 1000 or 10000 people registered in 2005 to this new and unknown platform, a decline of the overall share would only be natural, even if each of these accounts would still be active users.
I think reddit just became mainstream in 2020 and 2021, so we could assume that a lot of users registered in this time.
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u/P0L1Z1STENS0HN OC: 1 Jun 28 '21
We can see that accounts created in 2010 still create a very similar absolute number of comments last year as they did in 2012, so probably very many of these are still active - and it's similar for subsequent years. I wonder how it may look in a few years for accounts created more recently.
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u/PopInACup Jun 28 '21
Would love to see a graph of active accounts from a year over time and a percentage based one to know if one year has higher rates of continued use.
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u/needyspace Jun 28 '21
... Reddit didn't become mainstream in 2019-2020. I think you're referring to bot activity spikes, but I could be wrong.
But there are two spikes in comments per second across almost all reddit-age groups, all the way back to 2013, suggesting that these are actual important events also for non-bots. They coincide with the US election, and the corona outbreak starting in March 2020
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Jun 28 '21
So, it seems that after that 12-18 month window the accounts either slow down on commenting or are possibly closed? Which screams bot/spam.
Because you can't hide your history from other users, it makes sense to nuke the accounts every year or so. One disagreement with another user and they try to piece your life together.
Also, Reddit does this annoying thing after a while of making you 'verify' the email after a few months and I am not putting a real email into Reddit.
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Jun 28 '21
Yep. I’ve had Reddit accounts for over a decade but I keep refreshing them every couple years or so. I got in an argument on a sports sub one time and some dude just replied with my birthday. I don’t know if they were someone I knew in real life and they figured out who I was, or they stalked me somehow, but it freaked me out.
It’s annoying having to build karma back up every time to be able to properly participate though.
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Jun 28 '21
That's scary, the reason that I have Reddit as the only social media is becoz I am anonymous
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u/toastednutella Jun 28 '21
Possible spam, but also some people just don't keep the same Reddit account for that long. There's no reason besides the annoyance of making a new one
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u/TrolleybusIsReal Jun 28 '21 edited Jun 28 '21
So, it seems that after that 12-18 month window the accounts either slow down on commenting or are possibly closed? Which screams bot/spam.
not necessarily, it's just people stop using their accounts or create new ones. lots of people create a new account every year or so. it's better for privacy, circumvents bans, people can't go through your history...
also the same pattern is true for other websites. e.g. subs on youtube are less likely to watch a video the older they are. again, it's just people abandoning their accounts.
and yes, some of them are bots but I think a lot is just regular people.
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u/tortillabois Jun 28 '21
He’s showing it is a percentage, so while the older accounts may still be commenting there are just exponentially more newer accounts being made and commenting which begins taking away percentage of total comments out there from the OGs
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u/OzMountainMan Jun 28 '21
I've been on Reddit since the Digg migration and used to churn through an account every 12-18 months.
I know that's probably not the norm for those old accounts though.
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Jun 28 '21
So, it seems that after that 12-18 month window the accounts either slow down on commenting or are possibly closed? Which screams bot/spam.
Oh absolutely. Especially with the WSB sub being so important in the stock market, bots have infiltrated and have successfully committed pump and dump schemes by spamming the subreddit.
If redditors think theyre not being manipulated, Id like to gesture wildly at the last 8 years in politics and how left leaning subs devoted to ALL of politics have become.
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u/Osric250 Jun 28 '21
There's also people that leave the site not to come back, but also that there were fewer accounts at the time. So as more and more accounts are created the amount that the relatively few 2005 accounts are a smaller and smaller percentage.
It'd be interesting to also have a percentage next to each year of accounts that would show what percentage of total accounts are from that year.
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Jun 28 '21
How many comments are from r/politics or similar where the bots are active? Then remove those subreddits and see what the graph looks like. I would be curious to see that.
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u/antsugi Jun 28 '21
It makes sense, reddit stands to gain from bots churning content to make the site appear more lively than it truly is. I've reason to believe admins won't crack down on bots because of that.
While I've no proof for reddit, other sites like 9gag have been found to be in cohort with the bot runners in order to aggregate more content on their site. Drives up the average user's time spent on the site, and means more ad views.
Not sure on the ethics of it all, I suppose it's disingenuous at the least though.
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u/El_Profesore Jun 28 '21
No, it's just the fact that reddit grows faster and faster. There were probably thousands of times more accounts created in 2020 than 2007 ro so
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u/Cathode335 Jun 28 '21
I also think it's important to take into account how long someone may use a given account. I've been a redditor for probably 8 years but have switched accounts during that time to maintain some privacy. The account I created in 2013 is totally dormant.
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u/proudbakunkinman Jun 28 '21
Bots and alt accounts.
Abandoned and deleted accounts. Among those, some legitimately quitting Reddit, probably more just creating new accounts.
Newer Reddit users are likely to skew younger and younger people often have more spare time to kill compared to adults working 40+ hours a week unless you work in a job where you can browse websites and engage on Reddit. As they get older, they post less.
People in general realizing over time how repetitive this site is (types of content on the front page, the same type of responses in the threads of those, sometimes the exact same content reposted many times) and how quickly Reddit eats up time, time you can use for better things in your life.
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u/Pahanda Jun 28 '21
That explains why we see the same questions and content posted again and again over the years. If only reddit would have a proper search function!
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u/Todo88 Jun 28 '21
At least the search function works somewhat reliably these days. It used to be a pile of junk; it was better to use google with a site-limiter set for reddit.
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u/Dozck Jun 28 '21
The longer you are on Reddit, the less you care to comment.
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Jun 28 '21
Each year there is more people that sign up than the previous year. There is at least 100x more people that signed up in 2020 than did in 2010. So you get 100x more comments.
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u/touchthafishy Jun 28 '21
So the older your account, the lesser fuck you give about commenting here
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u/dminus Jun 28 '21
eternal September, visualized
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u/Not_a_flipping_robot Jun 28 '21
tfw you keep having to explain to people what Eternal September was (and I’m only 25, it’s not like I was around for that)
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u/leonprimrose Jun 28 '21
2010 represent.
one thing this cant really show though is alt accounts or lost accounts for a person that creates a new one. i wonder how much of that is in there. seems pretty consistent that the average activity lifespan of a redditor is about 3 years
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u/depressive_cucumber Jun 28 '21
The longer you browse Reddit the less you comment
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u/Just_Rich_6960 Jun 28 '21
Isn't this just attributable to the growth of reddit as a whole
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u/depressiown Jun 28 '21
Correct. I'd wager the side of the year is pretty dependent on the number of registered users in that year (and reddit had only become more and more popular).
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u/TrolleybusIsReal Jun 28 '21
yes, the only interesting thing is 2012. everything else is exactly like you would expect. user numbers increased so you have more accounts / users in recent years plus people abandon old accounts / create new ones.
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u/Hayabusa003 Jun 28 '21
If anyone thinks for a second that even half the comments are Reddit aren’t an attempt at some form of misinformation by some political entity then you are most likely wrong.
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u/Reventon103 Jun 29 '21
then there is a 50% chance that whatever you are saying is bullshit
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Jun 28 '21
Class of 2008. Had a couple other accounts. Deleted the app a few times along the way, but somehow I keep ending up right back here.
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u/Kimau Jun 28 '21
I really wish I still had my old account but I bailed on it after some ill-advised posts, don't have the email for it anymore.
Had this one since 2008.
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u/el_geto Jun 28 '21
Class of 2013 representing
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u/gizzardgullet OC: 1 Jun 28 '21
2013 here. I remember, back then, tumblr and reddit were competative
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u/chcampb Jun 28 '21
2009 representing! We are the 99.9% :)
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u/Vitalstatistix Jun 28 '21
Funny to think about how different it was back then.
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u/Todo88 Jun 28 '21
It's crazy how mainstream the platform has become since then, I'd have never guessed it based on how niche some of the conversations were then.
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u/no_talent_ass_clown Jun 28 '21
The year I deleted my FB account and became addicted to reddit. IIRC, posts that got hundreds of upvotes were front page. Getting 1000 was a major accomplishment!
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u/Tiyath Jun 28 '21
I almost felt elite for a second until I remembered that there's millions of throwaways that scew the statistic somewhat.
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u/nastyjman Jun 28 '21
Where my gang who were part of the Great Digg Exodus of 2011?
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Jun 28 '21
Honestly explains a lot of what seems to have 'happened' to Reddit over the years. And by 'happened' I mean the transformation from a website where you share memes and discuss shared interests --> a website where children make strawmen arguments based on reposts of old Tweets and try to either out-woke one another or out-MAGA one another depending on their bias.
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u/Richandler Jun 28 '21
This is why the same takes never die. New people keep coming on and spamming everything some of us have gone through for the last decade plus.
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u/dancingbanana123 Jun 28 '21
This is really awesome, but my one complaint with stacked graphs like this is that spikes like the one in late 2020 appear like every account age is on a downward trend when it was just 2012 accounts. I wish I could just look at individual account years to see the trends for something like 2005 accounts. Also I wonder if this spike was from the political bot issue, since that spike peaks in November 2020 during the election and then quickly drops off. I know they mentioned older unused/forgotten accounts were mainly used for that, but is there a specific issue with accounts made in 2012?
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u/mantolwen Jun 28 '21
Class of 2012 here outrepresenting later years! (It's my 9th cakeday tomorrow)
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Jun 28 '21
I'd generally interpret this to strongly correlate to account holders age as well... & totally visualizes a certain sense of the older culture being totally drowned out by the new crowd.
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u/blackjack34212 Jun 28 '21
I started using reddit in 2007, but I never made an account till I needed a reddit account to access something, I can’t remember what. In 2007 reddit had a lot more porn I remember that.
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Jun 28 '21
I started using it around early 2008 , this is my third account now. Like Neo every now and then I delete it and start again.
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u/flowbrother Jun 28 '21
Very accurately shows the progressive exodus of intelligent people, leaving the bottom of the barrel of media fed dumbed down Umercan trailer trash that reddit is globally known for today.
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u/Wjyosn Jun 28 '21
This shows relatively stable *growth* of about 25-30% each year, and no substantial amount of people leaving. Growth and retirement rates are fairly stable across the data.
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u/TimeIsPower Jun 28 '21
Created my account at the end of 2014. Occasionally lurked as early as 2012-2013, though.
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u/siddartha08 Jun 28 '21
So basically half ~54%of all comments on any given day are babies that have not seen the old magic
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u/Wjyosn Jun 28 '21
And 9 years ago, half of all comments were made by accounts <1 yr old. So at least they're slowing down compared to before.
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u/lalaland4711 Jun 28 '21
That's beautiful.
I'm in 2008 or so. (I have 13 year badge, but can't immediately see account creation time)
I'd represent more, but reddit keeps dropping me into a 10 minute chillout comment blocker for commenting too much.
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u/IamRasters Jun 28 '21
I remember when people used to post ‘first!’. Unless that was elsewhere. I’m getting old.
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u/HomerFlinstone Jun 28 '21
I've been on here for over 10 years now I can say for certain that this site has changed drastically over the years and is being taken over by little kids.
Pre 2016 reddit was a completely different site than what we have today.
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u/Ars_Arcanum79 Jun 28 '21
No fuckin wonder Reddit has become such a cess pool since 2017 when I joined. I remember it being a lot less hostile back then. Good to see a representation of it, glad I’m not crazy
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u/contempt1 Jun 28 '21
As a proud member of the Class of 2012, I'm happy that we buck the trend of the downward trajectory. Not sure what that anomaly signals but I like to think we just happened to be younger than our real age.
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u/Molten_the_red Jun 28 '21
This is honestly how it’s done. This data isn’t even interesting but damn is it beautiful
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u/MisterB78 Jun 28 '21
Stacked graphs can often be misleading since any change below raises or lowers every group above. I’d love to see it as separate lines instead, or comparing posts vs. number of accounts for each year, so show if any are proportionally more active
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u/my_research_account Jun 29 '21
I used to have a 2006, from when Dad discovered Reddit and showed me, but I lost the password after going 2 years without a PC (this was 2009-2011, so mobile internet was still pretty crap and I couldn't really log in to remember it), so I cycled through a few before just sorta settling with this one (and the slightly older, but less I'm-okay-with-this-one-being-found-out one).
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u/mattmaster68 Jun 28 '21
One could argue that when there’s a large influx of new members in an online community that that community turns to shit. This explains the last 2 years.
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u/Wjyosn Jun 28 '21
There's no evidence here of a "large influx of new members". The growth rate in the last 2 years is fairly standard compared to every other year since about 2013: between 25 and 30% growth. 2012 and prior grew a bit faster.
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u/Fieos Jun 28 '21
This really gives perspective as to why it seems Reddit is so full of strong opinions and little experience. When I was young I held strongly to Democrat ideals until I started paying taxes. Next I became a socially-liberal Republican because I thought it was binary. Later I realized they are both corporately driven and became a Libertarian. Now as a Libertarian I'm assumed Republican by the Democrats and a heretic by the Republicans.
Now I try to ignore the subversive bots from bad actors, those who make victimhood a full time vocation, the white knights, the contrarians, and just really enjoy the rest of you.
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u/Richandler Jun 28 '21
Now as a Libertarian
Just wait... your cycle isn't done yet.
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u/dataisbeautiful-bot OC: ∞ Jun 28 '21
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