Having posted a lot of blog entries to the Haskell Subreddit lately with mixed results, I wrote a script to gather all /r/haskell posts for the last year and visualize them.

It pages the API at https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/search/submission/, parses the created_utc and score fields from the response, and converts the data to CSV fields including the day of the week and UTC hour of the day.

The script, including the CSV output, is here: https://gist.github.com/dfithian/4842b420640c6a793b52cdda012cb391.

I imported the data to a Google spreadsheet and plotted it to see if there were any obvious insights. Here are the results! Warning: Past returns do not indicate future performance.

Hour of day

Volume ramps up over the course of the day. It’s highest at 16 UTC, which is around the time most folks in Europe are leaving work. There’s a bump right before bedtime for a lot of folks in North America.

/assets/volume-by-hour-of-day.png

The average score by submission hour is interesting. Submissions that land just as Europe is waking up are popular (7 UTC), as are submissions right after they stop working (18 UTC).

/assets/avg-score-by-hour-of-day.png

Day of week

Volume is highest at the beginning and end of the week, with the lowest days being Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.

/assets/volume-by-day-of-week.png

Apparently nobody goes on /r/haskell on Saturday, which makes sense as people like to do other things over the weekend.

/assets/avg-score-by-day-of-week.png

The most opportune time to submit

Based on the above, it seems like the most opportune time to post would be weekdays around 7 UTC. Those posts get the highest scores while having not much competition given the low volume.