Diamond Hands on the Data 💎🙌📈

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/ldgmfc/diamond_hands_on_the_data/

created by KeyserSosa on 05/02/2021 at 20:36 UTC

5690 upvotes, 150 top-level comments (showing 25)

Hey there redditors!

In case you’ve been living under a rock or didn’t see the rockets firing off for Pluto, r/WallStreetBets has had quite a week, uncovering sources of deep value. Since things are moving fast, and there’s a lot of “detailed” analyses and data flying around, we figured it was a good time to share some notable user activity and traffic insights pertaining to what we’ve been seeing over the last week.

First off, here’s what Reddit’s platform traffic has looked like over the last week, with the week before for comparison, in arbitrary Reddit traffic units.

Site-wide week over week traffic growth. Blue is last week. Red is this week.

Over the past 15 years, we’ve become well seasoned when it comes to scaling up and mitigating ever increasing volumes of traffic. And, though we’ve employed the tricks of the trade with autoscaling, seeing a >35% uptick in sustained peak traffic in one day is decidedly *not normal*.

[Huge props to our Infrastructure and SRE teams (who are hiring[1]) for HODLing and keeping this particular rocket flying during last week and minimizing the few interruptions we did have.]

1: https://www.redditinc.com/careers

Unsurprisingly, this is *mostly* due to a giant influx of users to r/WallStreetBets, which has shown a *slight* but noticeable uptick in traffic:

Views of r/WallStreetBets by hour for the last few weeks.

Notably between January 24th-30th, there was a 10x increase of new users viewing r/WallStreetBets. So, importantly, we now have a *much better* notion internally of “market hours” that we can track. We also found a way to track the time of the closing bell. There is one particular user (who we will leave up to speculation) whose profile page sparked especially high interest when trading ended on Monday. This particular user has *so many awards*, loading their page identified some bugs in how we’re *handling* representing awards and was causing stability issues. Here’s what that traffic looked like:

Spot the anomaly. It's subtle.

“Hot new community has traffic surge” is at best a tautology, so let’s spend a minute looking at the *impact* of that surge in r/WallStreetBets. Since the community has been highly visible on and off Reddit for the last week, one would expect to see its effect on sign-ups. The below graph illustrates what percentage of new Reddit users had viewed r/WallStreetBets on their first day during the month of January:

New Reddit user activity during January 2021.

This isn’t terribly surprising given how much external attention and news there has been about r/WallStreetBets and Reddit. Although r/WallStreetBets received an anomalous surge of traffic, the composition of the traffic is pretty anomalous free. This looks like a bunch of new users trying to engage in the community versus a new and awful surplus of “bots.” Over the past week alone, we’ve seen millions of people coming to Reddit and signing up to become new users (2.6x growth week over week). The fact that *so many users* decided to do this in such a short period of time is the amazing part.

And of course, the fun wasn’t just from new users. The r/WallStreetBets community was also front and center across many of our feeds and has continued to maintain that position over the past week:

Existing user activity. What percentage of existing users viewed content from r/WallStreetBets since the start of the year.

Dealing with all of this immediate attention can prove to be challenging, so major props to the mod team for diamond-handling such a huge surge of users. In fact, the community has significantly increased by 5.6 million users over the past two weeks. The moderators were on *overdrive* during this period. The community’s default set of rules imposes limits on the behaviors of new users (something we all know is pretty common in the larger communities) and so together with a surge of content being created in r/WallStreetBets, we saw a similar surge of removals on the same timeline:

Content removal split across admin actions and the various flavors of moderator tools.

The volume of content removals seems drastic, but keep in mind that it’s also the *point*. It takes new users a bit of time to figure out the style and...mores of how to interact on Reddit. Not all content is original, and unfortunately (as I find out myself more often than not), someone might have been faster to the joke that you just came up with than you were. Oh, and there can only be one true “first” in a comment thread…

That’s not to say nothing got through. Quite the contrary! Let’s take a look at what was being talked about:

Which is to say that GME has been a *persistent* topic for quite a long time indeed and its prevalence has scaled up as traffic on r/WallStreetBets has scaled. Near the recent peak, it looks like diversification into AMC started to pick up, followed by a *brief* foray into silver (unfortunately not *Reddit* silver). This graph doesn’t show sentiment, however, and after a brief speculative discussion into the intrinsic value of precious metals, the community spoke up and then doubled-down on fundamentals, meaning the *vast* majority of those silver posts are anti-silver.

Well that’s what we have for now. I have some time for the next hour to stick around and answer questions. Suffice it to say it’s been an interesting and exciting week, and I’m glad to be able to try to distill it down into a small pile of graphs.

Comments

Comment by [deleted] at 05/02/2021 at 20:42 UTC

353 upvotes, 3 direct replies

damn that's crazy, I wish I could read

Comment by KeyserSosa at 05/02/2021 at 20:37 UTC

3055 upvotes, 71 direct replies

This was actually a lot of fun to pull together. If people generally like it, I'd like to do more of these.

Comment by ThaddeusJP at 05/02/2021 at 20:39 UTC

551 upvotes, 3 direct replies

So not to immediately bring up drama, but did you guys have to nuke some mods over there because they were trying to get paid and/or cause any legal issues for Reddit itself?

Comment by HauntedFurniture at 05/02/2021 at 20:42 UTC

182 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Let's not forget all the messy drama[1]. Can that be expressed in graph form?

1: https://i.redd.it/vd6jrqe32ef61.png

Comment by 666pool at 05/02/2021 at 20:44 UTC

120 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Really cool stuff, thanks for sharing the data! In addition to handling your own issues that came up (e.g. the large number of awards on a profile page) were there any issues that came up with your hosting platform itself which you can give as feedback for them?

Comment by BuckRowdy at 05/02/2021 at 20:48 UTC

53 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I simply cannot fathom the volume of award spam DFV got in his inbox. In a 24 hour period he had been given well over 6000 awards.

Comment by Urbanviking1 at 05/02/2021 at 21:47 UTC

132 upvotes, 3 direct replies

I follow a number of trading/investing subreddits and one thing I noticed is that regular users of these smaller subs are expressing concern that there is an overflow of new users from r/wallstreetbets that will turn their helpful subs into the next wsb. Namely r/options and r/investing.

Is there anything mod teams from smaller helpful subreddits can do to prevent the community from turning into wsb?

Comment by reddixmadix at 05/02/2021 at 21:14 UTC

66 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Thanks for this info. Interesting to see how things evolved.

The annoying part was seeing disabled features in order to accommodate for this insanity, ha ha.

Comment by Whistifer at 05/02/2021 at 20:53 UTC

85 upvotes, 3 direct replies

Hey! Love the breakdown in traffic and overall upkeep of the rise of r/WallStreetBets but one thing has been showing up a lot. What’s going on with the mod teams at WSB?

u/zsj and a few other mods got removed from their positions and 9 new accounts come in with full permissions in under 3 minutes. Can you give us a little bit of insight of how it’ll be handled or what plans are there for the WSB mod team? Thanks again for the OP!

Comment by HengaHox at 05/02/2021 at 20:41 UTC

60 upvotes, 1 direct replies

uncovering sources of deep value

👀

Comment by parlor_tricks at 06/02/2021 at 00:13 UTC

13 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I love the data narration.

But the odd ball of the whole thing was the anomaly on loading awards. Now that's the kind of edge case you can miss, but wont secretly destroy your server since it is so rare. That must have felt great to find and fix.

You should also definitively make these kinds of reports - they are essentially historical record, and will be crucial for society/people to remark on how we behave(d) online.

I'd make it a standard part of the reddit HQ offering - a set of some neutral metrics (won't get you into a flame war), that allow consistent metrics to gauge various incidents as they occur in reddit history.

Comment by Myrx at 05/02/2021 at 20:47 UTC

76 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I don’t think there was actually a foray in to silver. 🤖

Comment by didgerdiojejsjfkw at 05/02/2021 at 20:38 UTC

21 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Wow!

Comment by Uptons_BJs at 05/02/2021 at 20:46 UTC

42 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Thanks to wallstreetbets, there has been a huge influx into all the other finance and economics subs. I'm actually so happy about this phenomenon.

/r/badeconomics and /r/askeconomics both cracked 200 thousand last week. I never thought I'd see the day where /r/askeconomics would get 20 thousand new subscribers a day, but that happened last week.

Comment by UniqueUser12975 at 05/02/2021 at 22:42 UTC

10 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Hi. Can you comment on unauthorised bots, I. E. Is there any evidence big financial institutions are automating posting or scraping info from reddit?

Comment by _Aporia_ at 05/02/2021 at 21:25 UTC

7 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I have an interesting question if you could answer, only if possible. During this rise in numbers, is it possible to see the largest growth of new users by region? Seeing some interesting comments in that sub that's suggesting someone has hired a large amount of bots that would mainly be operating from India, wondered if a comment could be made on authenticity. And one more question, is it possible to see if any older unused accounts with no affiliation with WSB suddenly reactivated to comment on WSB specifically? Thanks in advance

Comment by Jay-Par at 05/02/2021 at 20:45 UTC

31 upvotes, 1 direct replies

So what your saying is HODL!! Gotcha!

Comment by N3DSdude at 05/02/2021 at 21:00 UTC

8 upvotes, 0 direct replies

This is great of you guys to share the data on how active the subreddit has been, would love to see more of these!

Comment by Lyra125 at 05/02/2021 at 21:21 UTC

8 upvotes, 1 direct replies

It was brought up by mods in r/wsb how you guys were having to scramble to deal with the technical issues of having extremely busy live threads being used as large form public chat rooms.

Can you expand on that at all from your perspective? What were some of the challenges? And has that experience given you reason to look into alternative solutions (subreddit chatrooms, for example) to possibly be implemented to the site?

Comment by justcool393 at 05/02/2021 at 20:43 UTC

7 upvotes, 0 direct replies

This is really cool! Thanks for showing us this data!

Comment by Fedorabro69 at 05/02/2021 at 21:05 UTC

7 upvotes, 0 direct replies

We did it reddit!

Comment by FindingMyPossible at 05/02/2021 at 20:46 UTC

23 upvotes, 1 direct replies

💎🙌💎🙌 Nice job server team!

Comment by Darth_Kyryn at 05/02/2021 at 21:40 UTC

7 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Props for being cool and not pulling a discord by banning r/wallstreetbets like some were worried was gonna happen.