Social networks all have their own ecosystems, personalities, focuses, and in-jokes, and Reddit’s are unlike any other. The platform is truly in a world of its own, with everything from memes to deep discussion of niche topics, with honest opinions from knowledgeable and expert users, which is why we think it’s really important to understand what’s happening on the platform.
So in this blog, we will look at the communities that have the highest score (i.e. the net number of upvotes minus downvotes), the individual posts with the highest score, and the link posts (to external content) that had the highest score. We’ll analyze the same thing for each of the above to see what drove the most comments as well.
In our first, introductory post, we are going to do all of this in one place, but we’d love your feedback on what you’d like to see in this analysis.
Here are some of the key takeaways to give you a flavor:
- r/place dominated the top posts
- r/memes was a particularly successful community in terms of the highest score
- r/AskReddit was the community that had the most discussion
Let’s look at the data.
The highest scoring Reddit communities of April 2022
As we’re starting this in April, it’s worth throwing in a little context about the rest of the year up to this point.
We’ve seen success in the r/memes community, which has been top every month since the beginning of the year, but we’ve also seen sustained success for the likes of r/antiwork and r/worldnews, both of which rose in the rankings as conversations about labor issues and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine increased.
So what does April 2022 look like, and is it any different than what came before?
The short answer is yes, and that was because of the success of r/place, a community built around a social experiment that debuted in April 2017. It was brought back in 2022, and became one of the hot topics of the network, displacing even r/memes, as the chart below shows.
r/memes tends to be well ahead of other communities in sheer number of upvotes, regularly receiving tens of millions per month. Other communities that did well in April fell along the traditional lines of ‘surprise and delight’ as shocking feats and wholesome content performed well in the likes of r/nextfuckinglevel and r/mademesmile.
The communities that drove the most conversation offer a different viewpoint, with in-depth conversations one of the platform’s real strengths.
Unsurprisingly, r/AskReddit was the top community by a considerable distance, with more than 3 million comments on posts in the subreddit in April alone. This was significantly more than in other communities, who tended to group around 1.5 million comments at the top end.
On r/AskReddit, some of the top questions included advice you would give to your 13-year-old self, what ruined religion for people, and the biggest scam nobody wants to admit.
For other top commenting communities, the posts were varied. In r/Eldenring, there were extended conversations about unpopular opinions, weapons of choice, and most hated monsters. For r/worldnews, Macron’s French election victory and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (via a live thread with daily posts) were some of the top conversations.
But what about the top posts outside of the context of top communities?
Top posts on Reddit in April 2022
The top posts overall were unsurprisingly dominated by r/place, which had five of the top ten posts.
The final screenshot of the finished r/place project was the highest scoring post with 324k, and various posts about its development and progress filled out the top ten. Outside of r/place, a post of Ice Age’s Scrat finally getting his acorn was the top post, and the only other one to net a score of 300k or more. Johnny Depp’s court performance and an AMA with Nicolas Cage were two of the other top posts.
The top scoring posts were a fairly even mix of images and video, with just one text post amongst them.
Posts that generated the most comments were substantially different, though r/place still performed well with the top two posts overall.
The top posts all generated significant discussion, with the top ten ranging between 40k and 100k comments. Some of these comments themselves had tens of thousands of upvotes, showing that often they were up there with the original post itself in terms of how influential they were.
r/AskReddit was of course omnipresent here, but r/banano and r/squaredcircle both also featured. For posts that drove comments, text posts dominated, no matter the community.
The top link posts on Reddit in April 2022
Before we wrap up this analysis, it’s worth looking at the top link posts on the platform, to draw something of a contrast with what performs best on Facebook. Of course, it’s not a direct comparison in this case, as here it’s at the post level rather than the url level, but it serves as a worthwhile proxy nonetheless.
r/worldnews had many of the top scoring Reddit posts in the month of April, and Emmanuel Macron winning the French election was the first among those. While Ukraine did feature heavily, engagement in the community was not limited to Russia’s invasion, with Spain also appearing. r/technology and r/news each had one of the top three posts, with John Oliver’s piece on digital data and Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation as the first Black female Supreme Court Justice both scoring highly.
For the most commented news, r/technology had the most commented post, looking at Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter being accepted.
This post had almost 19k comments, and r/technology had another top post with an extended discussion on Netflix adding commercials, and three further highly commented posts that made the top ten. The list was rounded out by posts from r/news, r/movies, r/worldnews, and r/politics.
And that’s that for our first monthly deep-dive of the top performing content on Reddit. Again, we think it serves as a useful reminder of how varied the internet can be even at the platform level, to say nothing of the niche communities that exist within the platform — and just how much engagement these niches can generate. We hope you’ve found it as valuable as we have found it interesting to write, and we’ll be back with a new one next month.
In the meantime, if you’d like to take a look at what’s succeeding on Facebook, you can read our April publisher rankings here.
