familiarcycle

Stats on /r/roguelikedev's Sharing Saturday

Dec 16 2018

I browse Reddit's /r/roguelikedev often and plan to share Weedlike updates on its Sharing Saturday thread at some point in the future. I was curious how busy the weekly thread can get, as it's a good place to market your game and garner feedback from other roguelike developers (besides being a good place to see cool games in progress!). Using Reddit's API I was able to collect some statistics.

What I wanted to know:

Why? If you want to use the thread as a marketing tool or means of getting feedback, you want to maximize eyeballs on your top-level comment (by top-level I mean a comment that's not nested beneath another). People only have so much attention to give, so the closer to the top of the thread, the better. At some point they'll stop scrolling, and you want to sit somewhere before that point. Assuming your comment is upvote-worthy (maybe a strong assumption?), posting early in the thread means there's less competition to earn the upvotes of the first viewers. You want to earn enough to "stick" near the top of the thread. It's surely harder to post later and have to climb the ranks.

Here's data based on analysis of the past 25 Sharing Saturdays.

Post creation times (Pacific Standard Time)
Earliest 03:58:40 PM Friday
Average 04:46:18 PM Friday
Latest 05:20:11 PM Friday

Time to first 7 comments (hours:minutes:seconds)
Earliest 00:25:16
Average 01:50:48
Latest 07:32:15

Finally, here is a graph of all top-level comments bucketed into hours since post creation. Most activity occurs in the first 24 hours, with the first hour being far and away the most busy. Amazingly, at least one comment was posted 162 hours later, almost in time for the next week's post!

I used PRAW (Python Reddit API Wrapper) to access the Sharing Saturday posts programmatically. It's quite nice! Interacting with posts and comments is pretty simple. Below I've posted the code I wrote for generating the statistics for this post.