Editors note: The content featured in this blog is from the month of May only, therefore any mention of Roe v. Wade came before the SCOTUS ruling on June 24th.
In our latest edition of the monthly Reddit rankings, r/memes returned to the top, displacing the seasonal r/place that had held the number one spot in April. May’s content also featured interesting facts, discussions about the NBA, and news about Roe v. Wade potentially being overturned by the Supreme Court.
Here are some of the key takeaways to give you a flavor:
- r/memes returned to the top of the charts as the top community
- r/worldnews remained one of the communities that generated the most conversation
- Sport-based communities were also high drivers of conversation
Let’s look at the data in detail.
The highest scoring Reddit communities of May 2022
As we have referenced already, r/memes was by far the top community, having almost 1.5x the score (number of upvotes minus downvotes) of even its closest rivals for the title.
r/MadeMeSmile and r/shitposting were comfortably second and third respectively with scores of around 20 million each. The rest of the top ten was then all relatively tightly packed, with five other communities having scores between 14 million and 15 million.
For r/memes, the top content focused on a joke about the platform’s video player (218k), a post about evolution (169k), and a humorous observation about how table salt gets made (144k).
Other top posts from the top communities included a duck that ran in a marathon and got a gold medal (r/MadeMeSmile), a dance break in a restaurant kitchen (r/Unexpected), and a diss track aimed at United Airlines from a man whose guitar was broken (r/nextfuckinglevel).
For the most commented communities r/AskReddit was once again dominant, with twice as many comments as any other community.
The top discussion topics included a discussion on famous places not worth visiting, and things people treat as religions but are not. It’s reasonably common in these cases for the comments to have as many, if not more, upvotes than the original posts themselves, which shows the value comments can have in this kind of post.
Other communities that generated high numbers of comments included r/nba, r/worldnews, and r/wallstreetbets, where discussions of the finals, Covid in North Korea, and stock discussion threads all thrived.
But what about the top posts overall?
Top posts on Reddit in May 2022
Unsurprisingly, some of these were similar to the top posts in the top communities, as there is inevitable crossover between high-scoring individual posts and the communities they appear in.
However, there were some exceptions.
A post about Jean-Baptiste Kempf was the highest-scoring individual post other than the r/memes post we discussed earlier, and interestingly r/memes only had one post among the ten highest-scoring overall. A post about winning a free beer in r/oddlysatisfying and a Vietnam vet being told the worth of their Rolex watch in r/interestingasfuck were the other top posts that didn’t come from the top ten communities.
The most commented posts were dominated by sports posts, with the Monaco Grand Prix the top of all of these, and the Spanish Grand Prix also featured in the top ten.
The sports posts that succeeded tended to be live discussion threads, with a UFC fight, the NBA playoffs, and the UEFA Champions League final all featuring.
Given its prominence as the top commenting community, it was unsurprising to see r/AskReddit appear several times as well, featuring many of the posts we already referenced, plus one about a currently legal thing that people expected to become illegal.
All of the highest-scoring posts were images and videos, while all of the most commented were text posts.
The top link posts on Reddit in May 2022
Link posts, of course, lie somewhere between the two, and are worth looking at in their own right as an example of how news travels across the platform.
Political news dominated as the Uvalde shooting and its aftermath were widely shared, and the pending Roe vs. Wade decision was discussed. Other topics of interest included news about the Satanic Temple, and a Shell consultant quitting in protest at the company causing “extreme harm to the planet.”
The major sources for both the top and most commented link posts included mainstream news sites such as Politico, ABC News, CNBC, and Business Insider, and the top communities appearing included r/news, r/worldnews, r/politics, and r/technology.
If you’d like to read our latest Facebook rankings for May 2022, you can do that here.
