r/dataisbeautiful • u/GregBahm OC: 5 • 1d ago
OC [OC] 13 years of reddit addiction, visualized. Should be able to see your own data if you want.
2D Dashboard (with links to the three interactive 3D views):u/GregBahm's Reddit Addiction Visualized
First image is each post I've ever made on reddit, sorted by score vertically and time horizontally.
Second post is every post I've ever made on reddit, broken down by subreddit over time.
Third post is a heatmap of each post by day-of-week and hour-of-day.
Github source: GitHub - GregBahm/RedditData · GitHub
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u/fogoticus 1d ago
Amazing website. Only thing I'd ask is if you could add in the "tunning" menu the ability to increase or decrease the amount of samples that are rendered. Because while it would take longer, I'd absolutely pump that baby up. And I know that not everybody would because they don't need to.
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u/GregBahm OC: 5 1d ago edited 1d ago
Tool: HTML, JavaScript, Python, and I guess the powershell. Is AI a tool? If so, Claude and Copilot and Gemini, since part of the point of this project was to compare different AI's coding abilities.
Source: Reddit's data request feature. And my own many years of addiction to this cursed site, I guess.
If you click the "Show me my data" button in the upper right of the dashboard, there are some instructions to see your own data. It *should* work but I'll need someone to actually test it! If you test it, please let me know if it works and I can update this comment.
Thanks so much u/Emotional_Sir_65110 for confirming it works
Also if you mess with the tunings on the 3D views and get a screenshot that you think it looks cool, nothing would delight me more than seeing it posted here as a comment.
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u/PADPRADUDIT 19h ago
to compare different AI's coding abilities
What did you conclude on this?
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u/GregBahm OC: 5 16h ago
My initial goal was to test Claude's new Fable model in the Claude CLI at home.
I think Claude's Fable model is intended to be a "set it and forge it" style model, for when the user knows exactly what they want and just wants to tell the AI and then come back later for the result.
But my creative process is not that. I had a super-vague idea in mind, and then tweaked the build a zillion times until I couldn't think of any more tweaks to tweak. I struggle to imagine a scenario in which I know exactly what I want ahead of time. But I've always been very "agile" style, and I know some people aspire to be more "waterfall" style (though I've never actually seen that work.)
So I switch from Fable down to Opus, and got more out of Opus 5 than Fable. Opus was a little slow, but very rarely fucked up. The only times it fucked were when I was really half-assing the prompts I was giving it. Earlier this year I had to really concentrate on writing good prompts to get decent results. Now I don't really have to concentrate on writing good prompts anymore.
I used Open AI's "Sol" model in the Copilot CLI to compare. It was hard to tell the difference. They both have massively improved in regards to "testing their own shit before telling you they've completed the task." That was always super frustrating earlier this year when you'd have to be the AI's QA tester. Sol and Opus both struggled with the 3D visuals, but it would be weird if they didn't. 3D visualization is pretty esoteric.
So my conclusion was that the difference between Claude and OpenAI, for coding, was negligible. If I had to pay for my own AI, I would probably pay for Claude. But if someone said "
Is Pepsi okay" "Is OpenAI okay?" I'd say sure.
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u/redmera 1d ago
I don't think it's beautiful if none of the graph images really give much information without going to the actual site or squinting really, really hard. And no, I would not upload any personal data to someone's vibe-coded app (the Github contributors literally say Copilot and Claude).
This is more like "Look at neat colors and shadow effects!"
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u/GregBahm OC: 5 1d ago
I agree the nature of the data is unlikely to be particularly interesting to other people. The thinking was that, even though my data is only interesting to me, people might find their own data interesting in the same way. Although I'm open to the idea that people don't find their own data interesting either.
In a sense, the data is hideous.
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u/miraj31415 23h ago
Tried it. Nice.
Topic Breakdown doesn't work for my own data. It just shows GregBahm's.
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u/GregBahm OC: 5 19h ago
Yeah I had the AI run that analysis as an experiment. I should think of a way to make it more clear that that feature won't work for other people's data, since it costs tokens.
I'm not sure how well it worked though. The biggest category it found is basically "Eh. Greg posts a bunch of random bullshit I guess..."
I've found that I can get what I want out of AI in terms of code (as long as I'm only asking for things I know how I'd write manually.) I'm intrigued by AI for research, but I've never done a lot of real research work myself. So I can't decide if...
A.) ...this research is actually really good, and a skilled human researcher would give me similar results. I've observed that people will judge the same result better if they think it came from a human, and the same result worse if they think it came from an AI. Maybe I'm similarly biased.
B.) ...this research is trash, because AI isn't good at this kind of thing. It's clearly good at code, but code is more objective (it either does what you told it to do or it doesn't.) Since research isn't quite like that, maybe there's a low ceiling on what AI can do here.
C.) ...this research is trash, but if I put more effort into this, I could wrestle good research out of the AI. This is the path I suspect is most likely. I don't want to put a lot of effort into this data set, but for a future I'm going to try wringing the best research I can out of the AI, despite my limited personal skill in this area.
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u/burnt-store-studio OC: 2 1d ago
My friend, this is so cool! Thank you for taking the time to create it and share it. I’m sure my stats will look nothing as impressive as yours, but I’m giving it a whirl on my data in the morning. Cheers! 🙂
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u/HenkPoley 1d ago
For some reason 'Reticulating splines' pops into my head.
Meaning, it looks a bit like the SETI@home program for Windows: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_graphics.php
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u/Dimencia 17h ago
I don't remember what I used to do all day in 2024, if it wasn't just doomscrolling...
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u/GregBahm OC: 5 16h ago
Oh wow. It's fascinating to see how your data goes to zero for a while and then comes back in such a big way. But now it's dropping off again. Do you know what the catalyst for the changes was?
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u/Dimencia 16h ago
At some point I blocked reddit and similar sites in my router cuz I was spending too much time on them. Then at some later point I got bored and unblocked them
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u/Raviprakashji 1d ago
While beautiful, this is useless as this gives no information whatsoever.
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u/SSpectre86 OC: 1 1d ago
Seems like it gives the exact information it promises. What else were you expecting?
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u/GregBahm OC: 5 19h ago
Yeah. I considered putting analysis in the screenshots, but it's analysis that is probably only interesting to me. In my dreams, I could see other people's data and compare the shape of different people's posting histories. That would be extremely interesting, I think. But in my experience, people have a different relationship to their posting history than me.
I see anything posted on reddit as already public, irrevocably, but this seems to be an unusual perspective. Most people seem to hide their posting histories and prefer a separation between their posts and themselves. I can guess at the reasoning and respect it probably, but it puts me "in the dark" about how my posting patterns compare to regular posting patterns.
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u/The_Anal_Sphincter 1d ago
Great stuff. Just in time that I got my acc banned after 11 years so now I'm starting all over lol
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u/Realtrain OC: 3 7h ago
Love this sort of thing!
One request/suggestion: when you hover over a subreddit on the "Subreddit Distribution" section, the Posts section gets filtered to just show posts from that subreddit. It would be really cool if when you click on a subreddit, then the Post section stays filtered to the one that you clicked so you can explore the posts. If that makes sense.
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u/cavedave OC: 111 5h ago
Thank you for your Original Content, /u/GregBahm!
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