[Air-L] Reddit Downvotes

[Alex Leavitt]

I've done a lot of work recently with reddit data. It's actually a
difficult issue of sampling unless you have access to their backend (which
I believe nobody has ever gotten). Unfortunately what you're asking is near
impossible.

One thing you can do is sort by "controversial" (though this isn't "most
downvoted," it's only the most-even up-to-downvote ratio). Then you can
collect via the API the "top 1000" posts (or here, most controversial 1000)
by various date lengths (all time, past year, past month, today, etc.).

As far as "near" impossible, if you're interested in a sub other than
/r/politics, you can start scraping every single post from a newly created
subreddit, so you have a population sample of the posts and their voting
scores. But with a long-time, active sub like /r/politics, you can't get
past the API limitations.

Alex

---

Alexander Leavitt
PhD Student
USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism
http://alexleavitt.com
Twitter: @alexleavitt <http://twitter.com/alexleavitt>



On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 11:23 AM, jose marichal <marichal at callutheran.edu>wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
> A student of mine is doing a project looking at the most downvoted articles
> in the sub-reddit "r/politics."  Does anyone know of a way to identify the
> most "downvoted" links on the site?
>
> Many thanks,
> Jose
>
>
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>
> josé marichal, ph.d. | associate professor | political science
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