davidwisdom/reddit-randomness

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 a GET request to /r/random (int, always 302)

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 of 99_886)
• current_users: How many users accessed the subreddit in the past 15 minutes (int, max of 999)
• creation_date: Date that the subreddit was created (YYYY-MM-DD or Error:PrivateSub or Error:Banned)
• date_accessed: Date that I collected the values in subscribers and current_users (YYYY-MM-DD)
• time_accessed_UTC: Time that I collected the values in subscribers and current_users, reported in UTC+0 (HH:MM:SS)
• appearances: How many times the subreddit shows up in randomness_12k_clean.csv (int, max of 9)

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/