Some people have complained that Reddit has shifted from a mainly tech oriented site, to a political one with a strong bias towards leftist articles. While I mostly follow programming.reddit.com where there are many interesting articles and discussions going on, it has been brought up many times that certain political websites constantly get submitted. This led me to run a small test in order to quantify the entity of this phenomenon. Let’s see what the most submitted sites on Reddit.com are. Consider that I don’t have access to their database, the data is retrieved from the 1025 available submissions in the ‘hot’ section, through a Ruby script that scraped their pages. It is a snapshot of the hot section at the time when I ran the script only, the results of this would be variable over time. This is just a fun way to get a sense of what’s going with Reddit’s submissions and shouldn’t be intended as a proper statistical analysis (as I don’t have access to the whole spectrum of submissions). For the sake of brevity, I only listed sites that had at least 4 submissions. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
Reddit.com
programming.reddit.com
science.reddit.com
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Hmmmm,
BBC and Guardian 22 to the left
Daily Mail 4 to the right.
Of course this is skewed by the fact that some sites do a heavy amount of self-promotion on Reddit. At Sciam we do zero (maybe this makes us fools, ultimately…) rather, trusting that the users will submit what they like best. Plus in my experience spamming reddit and digg with your stuff generally doesn’t work. Other sites, like ScienceBlogs, have individual users who submit pretty much everything they do to Reddit.
Maybe what this proves is that left-wing sites are more spammy than right-wing sites. Then again, maybe it shows a shift in focus thanks to the influx of defecting digg users during the HD-DVD brouhaha.
Most likely, it’s just a symptom of increasing political interest as the ’08 elections approach and George Bush keeps doing his best to tank his own party’s election chances in the future.