Reddit.com is a massive social media site with thousands of unique communities that focus on topics of all kinds. I was interested in learning more about the top communities, called "subreddits", on the entire webiste. I decided to collect data provided by reddit.com itself about the largest subreddits on the platform and use that data to learn about the types of communities that are most popular.
For the web-scraping in this project, I collect information across 8 pages of reddit's community rankings. Each page contains 250 subreddits in descending order of size, so my final dataset contains 2,000 subreddits (8x250) total. My process is documented in two R scripts:
reddit_scraping_script.R contains the code I use to extract and clean data from the webpage.
reddit_scraping_urls.R runs the scraping function on all 8 URLs and combines them into my final data.
My exploratory data analysis extracts a bunch of interesting insights from this dataset and creates charts for a few aspects of the category information. See my full analysis here.