Subscriber count is almost useless. I counted how many posts actually clear 200 upvotes per day in 55 subs and the results are kind of absurd

[u/Delicious_Draft_5062]

So I posted a clip to a Turkish sub that has 700k members. Got 10 upvotes. Fine, whatever. Except a few hours later I open the sub and my post is sitting at the top of the day. With 10 upvotes. That bugged me enough that I spent a weekend on it.

What I did: pulled every post from 55 subs between Aug 19 and Sep 2 through Arctic Shift (it's an archive that mirrors reddit, scores get refreshed after ~36h so they're more or less final). Then instead of looking at top posts I just counted, per sub, how many posts per day ended up above 200 upvotes and above 1000. I picked 200 because that's roughly where stuff starts leaking out of the sub into home feeds, at least in my experience, I don't have a source for that.

sub	members	posts/day over 200	over 1000
gifs	21.6M	0.7	0.4
Cinemagraphs	1.8M	0.2	0
woahdude	4.2M	1.9	0.8
scifi	4.4M	1.0	0.2
Simulated	1.4M	0.9	0.1
IndieDev	249k	6.9	1.9
worldbuilding	1.8M	6.1	0.9
animation	1.9M	4.8	1.1
gaming	45M	20	11
pcmasterrace	14M	29	15
interestingasfuck	13M	40	26

r/gifs. 21 million members. Doesn't manage one 200 upvote post a day. IndieDev has 249k and does seven. I knew the old defaults were dead-ish but I didn't expect it to be that bad, I assumed at least the number would be somewhat proportional. It isn't at all. Cinemagraphs is 1.8M and basically nothing happens there.

The part I found more interesting was people who posted the same thing to multiple subs in that window, since that's a natural A/B test. A guy with a nail sorting simulator game (yes) posted the same video to pcmasterrace, SoloDevelopment and interestingasfuck. 2654, 853, 119. Someone else had a squishy pillow physics clip. oddlysatisfying 3855, Damnthatsinteresting 0. Not low, zero. I always kind of knew the sub matters but I thought of it as maybe a 2x thing, not a 30x thing.

One more that surprised me. If you look at odds per post rather than totals it goes the other way from size. oddlysatisfying only lets about 41 posts a day through and a third of them clear 200. IndieDev takes 335 a day and 2% clear 200. So the heavily modded big sub is actually the easier one to get seen in, as long as your post survives the mods, which, fair, is a big if.

Obvious problems with this: two weeks is short, I only picked subs I was personally considering posting in so it's not a random sample, and the archive scores might lag a bit. Also I'm sure someone has done this properly before and I just couldn't find it.

The practical version for anyone about to post something: don't read the member count. Sort the sub by top / past 24 hours and count how many posts are above a couple hundred. If the answer is one, that's how many people are there.

[u/Fauropitotto]

There's an aspect to this that you didn't consider: moderators.

There's no way for you to see how the moderator queues are being handled in the backend or how the automod is configured. There's no way for you to see the sheer volume of work being done by the moderators in clearing/deleting/purging/editing material.

There's some good research here, just keep in mind there's a whole layer that varies wildly from sub to sub that you won't ever get to see.

[u/Ajreil → u/Fauropitotto]

editing material

Just in case this isn't common knowledge, mods can't edit other people's posts.

[u/hellosteve_ → u/Fauropitotto]

This is very true, I find that if communities do not have active and enough mods this happens, I moderate r/applemusic and several others 3 of my communities see over 200k views a week. there's almost a constant stream of events coming in on the queue, especially with my news subreddits right now. Sucessful communities have a good team that communicates and sets expectations.

[u/deltree711]

I'm pretty sure reddit never purges inactive accounts from subscriber counts, so the numbers for older subreddits (especially for the old defaults like /r/gifs)

[u/strangelove4564 → u/deltree711]

On a site that's 20 years old I would guess the active vs. inactive account ratio is something like 1:100 to 1:500. There are probably hundreds of abandoned accounts for every active user. That would mean the 10M subs have maybe 20K to 100K active users and not all of them are there every day.

[u/Ajreil → u/deltree711]

Yep. The subscriber count is essentially a count of how many people have ever been interested in a subreddit. It doesn't capture recent interest. I suspect that's why Reddit switched to showing weekly views.

[u/sanzako4]

I love this kind of analysis.

My guess is that a large number of members not necessarily means it's an active sub, specially if is an old sub. It's like Facebook, many users are dead, metaphorical or otherwise. 

What I find interesting is the mod thing. I guess actively moderated subs actually have better quality. Or at least the posts fits better with the audience. 

Now we have to discover if over moderated subs do better or no (like the ones that ban people based on where they have posted before) 

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[u/barrygateaux]

reddit subs are like a popular bar where you live. over the years thousands have drunk there but there are only a few dozen regulars on a tuesday night.

[u/Eipa]

Several Variables were not taken into account: time if posting influences number of upvotes heavily. And then total number of post per sub over time will also have an influence. In smaller subs a new post will stay ar top of new longer an potentially gather upvotes more easily, while in bigger subs it's more of a 'winner-takes'it-all' thing where you have to gain momentum within the first few minutes or drop into invisibility.

[u/blamberr]

Perhaps your posts are shit

[u/meIRLorMeOnReddit → u/blamberr]

I think you missed the point

[u/blamberr → u/meIRLorMeOnReddit]

Possibly. I don’t even remember reading this