RedditMods: Moderators of top-25'000 subreddits

RedditMods is a dataset that lists moderators of 25'834 largest and most popular communities on Reddit. The dataset is ideal for studying Reddit as a bipartite graph, where a moderator-node and a community-node are connected if the corresponding user moderates this subreddit. Clustering can then be performed to identify groups of subredits with a particular leaning, or to recommend similar communities.

Data Collection

The data was scraped in the associated Jupyter Notebook. The data was publicly available and collected on 06 Feb 2024. All usernames were anonymised by hashing with SHA256, so that they cannot be linked to the moderators' Reddit accounts.

Description of Files

The data is available both as a table and a bipartite graph.

GEXF – data in graph format

1. graph.gexf

   A bipartite graph, where nodes in the first group (having attribute bipartite=0) are moderators and nodes in the second group (having attribute bipartite=1) are subreddits. A moderator-node is connected with a subreddit-node if that moderator moderates this subreddit.

   Tags:

   • size on subreddit-nodes, indicating the number of subreddit's members

   ---

CSV – data in table format

1. subreddits.csv

   Contains 25K subreddits from Reddit's Top, combined with the list of Reddit's most popular communities. The two lists are not identical, as described in the Jupyter notebook. The headers are:

   • name: Name of subreddit
   • n_members: Number of members

   ---

2. moderators.csv

   Each row describes a subreddit-moderator pair:

   • subreddit: Name of subreddit
   • moderator: Username of moderator (anonymised by hashing)

   ---

3. bots.csv List of moderators that were identified as bots by the primitive procedure, described in the previous section. These accounts were already removed from moderators.csv.

   • name: Username of bot

   ---

Examples

• Visualising a cluster of subreddits moderated by a group of users

Notes and warnings

I used a very simple procedure to filter out auto-moderators: (1) a short list of known bots (e.g. u/AutoModerator), (2) username starts or ends with bot. An additional procedure to identify and remove bots might be necessary. For an example, see this notebook.