Anyone who has had their website get some traction on Reddit knows that it truly lives up to its “front page of the Internet” label — the kind of traffic the site drives can be remarkable. But the process by which a link takes off on the site is still pretty mysterious. For the most part, you submit something to Reddit, and cross your fingers and hope that it gets some attention.
Well, a cool new hack called Reddit Insight finally sheds some light on the methods behind Reddit’s madness. Developed by a team of five who are in the current class at the San Francisco-based programming bootcamp Hack Reactor, Reddit Insight draws on Reddit’s open API to display tons of analytics about Reddit, such as how submissions perform over time, what topics are trending in each sub-Reddit, and so on.
It’s a nifty site to browse through casually (did you know that despite the Internet’s reputation for being obsessed with felines, photos of dogs are actually more prevalent than cat photos on Reddit?) but it’s also a very cool tool that could be used for professional purposes. It’s no surprise that in the few days since Reddit Insights was launched this past weekend, the site has attracted a ton of attention from folks in the programming world as well as in the marketing world.
So we invited a couple of the hackers behind Reddit Insights, Elle Beal and Alex Gaputin, to stop by TechCrunch TV to give us a hands-on look at the project, and talk a bit about building it and the cool stuff it has already revealed. Check it out in the video embedded above.
