The FiveThirtyEight blog offers this cool interactive tool to find out the relative frequency of terms used on Reddit. The users of Reddit are mostly under 35 and 80% male, so they don’t sample the entire market, but they do show what a certain tech-enabled segment of the population talk about.
And they don’t talk about South Dakota. I punched in every state, and found that over the sample period from late 2007 to August 2015, South Dakota appears to have come up less in Reddit conversations than any other state in the Union. Our closest competition was Rhode Island:
South Dakota’s ups and downs often parallel Rhode Island’s which suggests that spikes in our share of Reddit conversations had less to do with remarkable events happening here and perhaps more to do with a lack of surges in other topics consuming everyone else’s attention.
Iowa comes out the regional champ thanks to its first-in-the-nations caucuses:
Take out Iowa’s caucus surges, and the consistent conversation leader since mid-2008 is Minnesota:
Punch your favorite terms into the FiveThirtyEight widget and see what you find generating buzz on Reddit over the past seven years!
Could be because of all its cronism.
“Mars” and “Oxygen” also rate quite a bit higher than “South Dakota”. Time for a new ad agency?
A few interesting observations to add to crossgrain’s:
1. “Mount Rushmore” ranks quite a bid lower than “South Dakota.” Who knew? I thought we were putting Mt. Rushmore on all our state ads to associate ourselves with something more popular. Whoops!
2. Until just this past year (with one brief exception), SD and “Donald Trump” were running dead even, with SD mostly ahead. And yes, Trump has always been a more popular topic than Mount Rushmore.
3. Map the words “consciousness” over the word “iTunes” and take a look. It will blow your mind. :-)
Since I’ve never heard of this before, I’m glad to hear they are not Redditing about us here in the Great State of South Dakota. Keep your head down, your powder dry, and your Reddits elsewhere, I say.
Say a prayer or kind word for the Aleutian Islands and Western Alaska. They are in the path of what could be their worst winter storm ever coming this week.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/powerful-alaska-storm-to-rival-strongest-on-record/ar-AAghUoR
Lots of Native Alaskans in that area.
“*Well, the mostly young and mostly male users of Reddit, anyway.”
That explains a lot. Search PBR, Bud Light or sexual slang. :-0
Bill, I note that the “consciousness” and “iTunes” tracks are the inverse of “Netflix.”
Also, compare “Hillary Clinton” and “Bernie Sanders”… and then, before you say young people don’t vote, notice that “voting” isn’t far below “beer.”
I believe we should tout our, South Dakota’s, lowest ranking on this Reddit. Another #1 for us!
Whoa! What’s with that 2013 beer spike? The Netflix, consiousness, itunes double helix is spooky Cory. I was going to type in ‘aliens’ on top of it but i was afraid i might get beamed up or something. :-)