We acquired our data using a Python script. This script looked at the Front Page of Reddit every 15 minutes and collects the top 25 most popular subreddits. We simultaneously tracked subreddits selected with large and moderately popular Subscriber counts. From them we collected Active Users counts and Subscriber counts.

In an effort to answer our questions the collected data will be analyzed using ggplot2 in R. We will begin by simply plotting active user data or subscriber counts, such as figure 1. Similar plots featuring multiple subreddits will allow us to easily compare trends over time, such as figure 2. Perhaps our strongest tool will be a plot of a selected subreddit over time that displays both active user and subscriber numbers with colors indicating when the subreddit was featured on Reddit’s main page.

Data-Driven Documents.
D3 is a library based on Javascript for the purpose of manipulating data. It does this by coverting the data into Document Object Models (or DOM) and allows the user to transform the data.