A map of all NSFW subreddits, and how it was created
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Published Sunday 3 January 2016 at 4:08am
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REDDIT user flashman has created a map showing the popularity of all NSFW (not safe for work) subreddits.

For those not familiar with the social network and internet terminology, NSFW content includes pornography, graphic violence, nudity, and other such content you would not want your boss to see you looking at on your work PC. Subreddits are sections of Reddit which deal with specific topics; for example, this map was posted in the “/r/dataisbeautiful” subreddit.

Unsurprisingly,  pornography dominates despite the representation not quite being to scale. Here is flashman’s explanation of the data:

“This map is based on /u/uglyasablasphemy’s ‘related subreddits’ data set. I simply filtered out all the non-NSFW and quarantined subreddits, as well as any ‘orphaned’ subreddit (no incoming links from another subreddit). There are 2267 nodes and 14437 edges.

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“The graph is laid out in Gephi using the ForceAtlas 2 layout. The subreddits are sized by number of subscribers (though not to scale, otherwise big subreddits would take up too much space). The colour scheme uses Gephi’s clustering function, so subreddits of the same colour are more closely related to each other than to other colours.”

Gephi is an interesting program. Totally free and open source, it can be used to map big and small data in interesting and meaningful ways. You can find out more about the program by clicking here.

You can see the NSFW map in better resolution, as well as the full discussion thread, by clicking here. (Click the red eye to view the map.)

What data would you like to see mapped? Comment below.

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Tags: data design gephi nsfw reddit

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