When's the best time to post on Reddit? Turns out it's 7 PM on a Monday night.
It's hard to game popularity on the internet — just ask the #brands — but according to one user who's been analyzing submissions for the past 75 weeks, when it comes to Reddit, there's a world of difference between posting on a Monday night and, say, a Saturday afternoon.
Working off of personally collected data, a redditor by the name of minimaxir combed through link submissions and isolated the ones that had "gone viral," by receiving over 3000 karma points or more.
Some patterns seem to match up with what we already know about our internet habits. As with online news articles, email click-throughs, and banner ad clicks, weekends are mostly dead zones, with some activity on Sunday afternoons. Somewhat surprisingly, Mondays — especially the evenings — are by far the highest probability time slot for a post to blow up. The data also shows that Redditors tend to check out early on both Wednesday and Friday afternoons and that pretty much anything submitted between midnight and 6 AM is doomed to obscurity (broadly speaking, of course).
Here's minimaxir's breakdown of 3000+ karma posts per day:
Sunday 12.55
Monday 17.47
Tuesday 16.44
Wednesday 14.05
Thursday 14.43
Friday 12.94
Saturday 8.64
While it's not official data, it's a reasonably comprehensive look, made all the more interesting by the fact that Reddit's trends are often indicative of internet behavior as a whole.