An unexpected trend I noticed recently is that posts with low upvote counts routinely make it to the frontpage.

This is common in smaller communities, but there are 4 million+ subscribers here. You’d expect posts on the frontpage would have a couple thousand upvotes instead of a few hundred each.

I dug into the numbers to check if it’s true.

I exported our top 100 posts and compared the upvotes-to-comments ratio to subreddits that share our hobby of yolo-ing life savings because a stranger told us to

That's Wallstreetbets and SuperStonk.

I scraped data from 300 posts in the last 30 days into a javascript object notation (JSON) file. Then I converted it into CSV format to find the headers that contained the info I needed: post title, upvote count, comment count, post type, flair, and a few others.

After that, it was just a matter of cleaning it up in Excel and making some pivot tables to combine data from all 3 subreddits.

Result 1: Users of Cryptocurrency give massively less upvotes than Wallstreetbets and SuperStonk

And it’s not even close. Here’s a summary of all 300 posts I scraped:

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You are 612% more likely to get an upvote in Wallstreetbets or Superstonk than on Cryptocurrency.

Other revealing stats are:

• We have 62% less subscribers than Wallstreetbets, but Cryptocurrency has 49% more comments
• Superstonk has 83% less subscribers, but they give 281% more upvotes than Cryptocurrency

A high upvote-to-comment ratio means that there are more upvotes than comments. A low ratio means users comment more than upvote.

Result 2: If you look at SELFPOSTS ONLY, Cryptocurrency also gives way less upvotes than anywhere else

Memes are allowed in both Wallstreetbets and SuperStonk which tend to be more upvote-heavy than comments.

If you exclude those, this is what you get:

Your selfpost is still 189% more likely to get an upvote in Wallstreetbets, and 625% more likely in SuperStonk.

Result 3: We also give out less post appreciation awards than other subreddits

Superstonk is way ahead at an insane 221 awards per post, then WSB is next with 65.

Cryptocurrency is last with an average of 51 awards.

This counts all awards: reddit gold, silver, helpful, facepalm, wholesome etc.

Conclusion/TLDR

Cryptocurrency is the Scrooge McDuck of upvotes. We like leaving comments a lot, but we don’t upvote the post we’re commenting on as often.

Why though?