Reading the rooms in Reddit

Before adding rooms to the ones GOSSIP reads on Reddit, we measured fifty candidates the same way and kept forty-seven, after taking three out on a second read. They run from r/instacart, with 69 thousand members, to r/relationship_advice, with 15.4 million. We counted two things over two windows and keep them apart: how 33,839 comments under 1,940 posts were written, from 5 to 28 August 2026, and what 1,179,387 posts were about, from 23 March to 22 October 2026, as a model read them.

Every number here is a count, a share or a median over a room’s comments or posts. No comment or post is quoted or paraphrased, and the comments and posts themselves aren’t published anywhere.

Five kinds of room

The rooms fall into families by what they’re for, and five families have seven rooms or more: commerce, where people buy, sell and resell; cohort, where they gather by who they are, like parents, servers or people over thirty; place, for cities and countries; meta/snark, where people watch other people or other rooms; and consult, where they ask for advice. Three smaller families hold the other four rooms. Every family number here is the median of its rooms.

In the median commerce room, 30.5% of comments use purchase words, 2.4 times the rate in consult, the next of the five at 12.8%, and the comments run short, 127 characters at the median. The word list counts store names too, so r/Costco’s 30.9% includes every comment that names the store. r/Costco also has the shortest comments of the forty-seven, 75 characters at the median, measured on ninety posts where most rooms had thirty.

Cohort rooms have the most first person of the five, 66.0% of comments, and the most story. In the median cohort room, 21.0% of comments tell something the writer did or something about a person in their life (“I tried”, “my husband”), and the median room’s stories outnumber its verdicts 1.86 to 1.

Meta/snark has the most talk about the wider culture of the five, at 5.3%, and it’s the one family of all eight whose median room has more verdicts than stories, 0.82 stories for every verdict. A verdict here is a comment that passes judgment in words like “I think”, “honestly” or “hot take”.

Consult has the longest comments of the five, 172 characters at the median, and 32.0% of them run past 280. Place rooms have the shortest comments of any family, 111 characters, and the least first person, 50.7%, and we’d guess that’s because people in those rooms ask about the city more than they talk about themselves.

The kind of post follows the same families. In the median commerce room 46.9% of posts are practical help, the most of the five, and 12.4% are about taste, also the most. Cohort rooms have the most contested posts, 20.8%, along with 36.4% that are personal stories. Meta/snark rooms have the fewest practical posts, 10.9%, and the most about events, 17.6%. Consult rooms come to 41.6% practical and 29.6% personal, and place rooms to 31.4% practical and 14.6% personal.

Room size

On the forty-seven, the larger rooms lean toward longer comments (ρ = +0.21), and forty-seven rooms aren’t enough for us to tell that lean apart from chance (p = 0.15). The tie that clears chance is to who’s talking: larger rooms have more different people per hundred comments (ρ = +0.34, p = 0.02). In the smaller rooms a comment is more likely to come from someone who has already commented, which we read as the same people answering each other.

These rooms were picked because people write in them at some length, so they cover a narrower spread than Reddit does, and a narrow spread pulls any correlation toward zero. We haven’t measured a wider set, so we can’t say whether the lean toward longer comments would sharpen or fade.

Talk about the culture

To count talk about the wider culture we used a list of 22 words and phrases, among them “nowadays”, “trend”, “algorithm”, “gen z” and “anyone else”, and counted the comments that use at least one. The median room comes in at 4.3%. One room goes past 10%: r/datingoverthirty, one of the nine read on ninety posts, at 12.7%. None of the forty-seven is a room about the culture, and the culture comes up as an aside inside rooms about buying and selling, dating, parenting or a city. The list counts words, so a joke about the algorithm and a complaint about it look the same to it.

The model’s topics give a second view of what the rooms are about. Among each room’s eight largest topics there are 97 different ones, 34 of them among the largest in five rooms or more and 17 in a single room. Mental health and therapy is among the largest in 17 of the 47 rooms, taking anywhere from 3.8% of a room’s posts to half of them, and it turns up in six cohort rooms, six consult rooms, one commerce room, one meta/snark room and three rooms in the smaller families. A post carries up to three topics, so a room’s shares add to more than 100%. The model also grouped the questions that rooms argue over, 212 of them asked in three threads or more under 78 topics, and we count them here without showing any.

How we measured

In each room we counted how long the comments run, how often people write in the first person, how many different people are talking, how much of the talk is about buying things and how often anyone mentions the wider culture.

Every room got thirty posts, three from each of ten equal slices of those three and a half weeks, along with each post’s own comments, up to a hundred per thread. Nine rooms gave back too few comments that way, so we read them again on ninety posts, and each of the nine came back with at least 150 different people commenting. Those nine rest on three times as many posts as the other thirty-eight.

We also had a model read the posts in the same forty-seven rooms, 1,179,387 of them between 23 March and 22 October 2026, and give each post up to three topics from a list of 103 and one kind: practical help, a personal story, something contested, a matter of taste, an event, or talk about the room itself. That read covers posts over seven months, where the comment counts cover three and a half weeks, so we keep the two apart and never set a number from one beside a number from the other.

For the model’s read we checked one post in ten a second time with the room hidden, 448,861 posts from these rooms over the two years to 22 October 2026. The two readings gave the same first topic for 65.5% and shared at least one topic for 89.4%, and agreement on the kind of post came to a kappa of 0.63, so we treat the topics as a coarse sort.

Sources

• Reddit posts and comments: the Arctic Shift archive. Posts of 5 to 28 August 2026 and their comments, members as of 4 September 2026, measured 4 September 2026; nine rooms re-measured 29 September 2026.
• Post topics and kinds: 1,179,387 posts from the same 47 rooms, 23 March to 22 October 2026, read by claude-haiku-5-5; built 26 October 2026.
• Hours on comments: GOSSIP’s daily Reddit harvest, comments and posts published 28 July to 11 October 2026, counted 12 October 2026.
• Figure 2’s people: Open Peeps by Pablo Stanley, CC0.

How to cite

Time&Again. Reading the rooms in Reddit. Report No. 01, 12 November 2026. CC BY 4.0.