Reddit Randomness Dataset
A dataset I created because I was curious about how "random" r/random really is.
This data was collected by sending GET
requests to https://www.reddit.com/r/random
for a few hours on September 19th, 2021.
I scraped a bit of metadata about the subreddits as well.
randomness_12k_clean.csv
reports the random subreddits as they happened and summary.csv
lists some metadata about each subreddit.
The Data
randomness_12k_clean.csv
This file serves as a record of the 12,055 successful results I got from r/random. Each row represents one result.
Fields
subreddit
: The name of the subreddit that the scraper recieved from r/random (string
)response_code
: HTTP response code the scraper recieved when it sent aGET
request to /r/random (int
, always302
)
summary.csv
As the name suggests, this file summarizes randomness_12k_clean.csv
into the information that I cared about when I analyzed this data.
Each row represents one of the 3,679 unique subreddits and includes some stats about the subreddit as well as the number of times it appears in the results.
Fields
subreddit
: The name of the subreddit (string
, unique)subscribers
: How many subscribers the subreddit had (int
, max of99_886
)current_users
: How many users accessed the subreddit in the past 15 minutes (int
, max of999
)creation_date
: Date that the subreddit was created (YYYY-MM-DD
orError:PrivateSub
orError:Banned
)date_accessed
: Date that I collected the values insubscribers
andcurrent_users
(YYYY-MM-DD
)time_accessed_UTC
: Time that I collected the values insubscribers
andcurrent_users
, reported in UTC+0 (HH:MM:SS
)appearances
: How many times the subreddit shows up inrandomness_12k_clean.csv
(int
, max of9
)
Missing Values and Quirks
In the summary.csv
file, there are three missing values.
After I collected the number of subscribers and the number of current users, I went back about a week later to collect the creation date of each subreddit.
In that week, three subreddits had been banned or taken private. I filled in the values with a descriptive string.
- SomethingWasWrong (
Error:PrivateSub
) - HannahowoOnlyfans (
Error:Banned
) - JanetGuzman (
Error:Banned
)
I think there are a few NSFW subreddits in the results, even though I only queried r/random and not r/randnsfw. As a simple example, searching the data for "nsfw" shows that I got the subreddit r/nsfwanimegifs twice.
License
This dataset is made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/