What does the Analysis page tell me?

What is displayed on the Post Analysis page, and how the “Best post on day” and “Best post this week” options automatically pick the best (or at least, a decent) time to post.

Later for Reddit is capable of generating a report that attempts to reveal more successful posting times.

The Algorithm

  1. The inputs are subreddit, threshold (a number), and period (either month or year).
  2. The first 1000 posts from the provided subreddit and period are retrieved. (In particular, 10 pages with a page size of 100 are retrieved from subreddit’s /top/ endpoint, with t=<period>. The result of this step is cached on the server for 24 hours.
  3. A count is taken of each posts’s posting time, for all posts over threshold votes. This count is bucketed by day of week and hour of day (or, if you prefer, hour of week).

In this way, we can see how many posts fell within each hour of each day of the week. This information can be used in a few ways.

The Post Analysis page.

Parameters

The Post Analysis page starts by collecting the inputs to the algorithm above:

These inputs are:

  • Subreddit: The subreddit to analyse.
  • Threshold: The minimum score (roughly, upvotes - downvotes) for a post to be counted as “successful”. If you only want to know about posts that got over 100 upvotes, enter 100 here. The default value of 5 was chosen arbitrarily as a small positive value. 0 (or below?) is a bad value for this field.
  • Period: The period over which to count posts. Month is recommended for more popular subreddits, while lower-traffic ones (or high-threshold analyses) might require the larger dataset of a year to produce useful results.

Results

The 3 hours of the week with the most posts falling within them are displayed at the top of the results section, followed by a heat graph of the posts, with rows as days of the week and columns as hours of the day. Darker cells signify more posts falling within that hour – you can mouse over these cells for more details.

Following this are two bar graphs, which show the same data aggregated only by day of week and hour of day. These graphs can reveal broader trends in terms of more active dates and times.

“Best Time” Calculations

For paid accounts, both the Regular Post Scheduling and the Bulk Upload options support automatically applying The Algorithm to the task of choosing a time to post:

  • The top posts from the subreddit in question are retrieved (with threshold=5 and period=year), and counted by day-of-week and hour-of-day.
  • The top hour is chosen for that day/week.
  • A random minute within chosen hour becomes the post time.

What about the Title N-gram calculator

This tool:

  • Retrieves the same pool of posts as previous.
  • Parses and cleans up the title of each post.
  • Builds up frequency lists of 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-word sequences and displays them.

Honestly, I built this just to see if it was useful, but I haven’t found a use for it yet except for fun.