Reddit is a treasure trove for excellent product recommendations. The site promotes unbiased product recommendations and bans posts from promoting products. On the downside, these recommendations are often ephemeral and you have to be monitoring Reddit often to get in on the recommendations. I looked through 100s of GBs of Reddit comment data to find some of the best recommendations that Reddit has to offer.
What type of products is Reddit recommending? Well, of the almost 100,000 products mentioned on Reddit since 2015, 30,081 are books. Unsurprisingly, almost all subreddits on Reddit recommend books. However, there are a few that stand out as subreddits that recommend a particularly large number of books. The top 5 subreddits are:
- AskHistorians (704 book mentions)
- comicbooks (621 book mentions)
- todayilearned (595 book mentions)
- politics (415 book mentions)
- Christianity (373 book mentions)
Of those, books tend to be mentioned multiple times. In the AskHistorians subreddit, the book that gets mentioned the most often is "Introduction to Folklore: Traditional Studies in Europe and Elsewhere." It's been brought up 6 separate times. The next closest book is "Washington: A Life" coming in at 3 mentions.
You can do this sort of analysis for any subreddit and start to get a sense for the things people are talking about.
What about across subreddits though? There are things that get brought up time and time again across all the subreddits. Curiously, or maybe not so curiously, depending on how familiar you are with Reddit, the most referenced item on Reddit by far is "Passion Lubes, Natural Water-Based Lubricant, 55 gallon." That has been linked to across Reddit 74 times. It's been mentioned across a wide variety of subreddits, but linked to the most in /r/funny (3 times).
The product that has been linked to the most in any one subreddit is the "amFilm Tempered Glass Screen Protector" in /r/NintendoSwitch. Perhaps indicative of a very good screen protector. One can expand this analysis to many other subreddits to likely find quality products.
Another way to find recommendations is to look at how much karma a comment has received. While this is frought with false positives (think comments mocking products), it also allows us to find great products that happen to only be mentioned once on Reddit. Additionally, sorting by karma uncovers unique and insightful comments left by redditors.
For example, the comment that received the highest amount of karma recommending a product in /r/HomeImprovement is this one, where the user details 30 things that are inexpensive but essential improvements to a new home.
ThingsOnReddit enables people to find hidden and unique recommendations by mining for products in Reddit's comment database. Check it out on thingsonreddit.com!
Ben Rudolph ben@thingsonreddit.com Creator of ThingsOnReddit