Thursday, April 20, 2023

The Map of Reddit Now Has Street View

The Map of Reddit now has a 'Street View' option which allows you to explore this organisational network map of the world's subreddits as a 3D environment. 

The Map of Reddit is an interactive map which organizes and plots subreddits based on their similarity. Subreddits are individual subject forums on the social news forum Reddit. On this Map of Reddit individual subreddits are positioned near each other based on how many users leave comments on both subreddits. The proximity of subredddits on the map is therefore based on the shared interests of Reddit users. 

The new 'Street View' option allows users to roam around the map in 3D, with individual subreddits displayed as 3D blocks. I don't own VR glasses myself, but if you do then I suspect that the Street View option provides a particularly fun way to explore the world of Reddit.

If you zoom out on the map you can view a number of 'countries' where similar themed subreddits have been grouped together. The largest of these 'countries; include 'Television', 'Gaming' and 'Programming'. You can also search the Map of Reddit for individual subreddits (for example if you like maps then try searching for 'mapporn'). This will allow you to see what other subreddits are liked by users of your searched Reddit forum.

The Map of Reddit is very similar to a map developed by Randal Olson in 2014. The Reddit World Map also represents every subreddit as a dot and organizes them based on how many Reddit users comment or post on two different subreddits.

Subreddits on this map which have many connections are mapped in red and those with few connections are mapped in blue. By grouping the subreddits by user activity clear communities of Reddit users emerge on the map. In fact the blog post introducing the map includes an interesting static version of the map where the continents of Reddit are picked out on the map.

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