Reddit is important – it consistently features in the top 20 most visited websites in the world and it’s where most viral content originates from. It houses some of the best data in the world while providing a relatively slick, ad-free platform for users to enjoy. As a B2B PR Agency, it’s our job (and our pleasure, with subreddits like r/animalsbeingderps) to spend time on it.
There’s a subreddit for everyone, but particularly for those interested in tech. It’s arguably the most popular platform for those working in tech, making it a great place to hear the latest news and do some market research.
If you want to know more about artificial intelligence, reddit is a great place to start. To help get you started, here are some of the best AI subreddits.
What makes a good subreddit?
As explained in our post on the best start-up subreddits, we’ve measured:
- Member count: Simply put, this is how many members are in the sub. A large sub doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best one (smaller subs can have higher engagement), but it’s a good sign of whether the content posted is relevant.
- Engagement level: We’ve looked at how engaged members are in the sub by looking at the number of upvotes and comments on the top posts from the past year.
- International: Reddit is a global website, but some subs are very US-centric, so we’ve made a note of whether they’re international, or not.
- Content-type: We’ve tried to generalise the type of content on each sub, mainly whether they’re advice-driven or just memes.
- Active moderators: Active moderators (or mods) keep the subreddit on-topic and rule-abiding. Weekly updates and sticky posts are usually a sign of an active mod team.
- Rules: There are rules laid out in Reddit’s rediquette that all subreddits have to obey, but mods can also impose their own rules. Higher quality subreddits tend to have stricter rules regarding the quality of posts and replies, which help keep the sub relevant.
As pointed out, it is a missed opportunity that this sub isn’t called r/tificial. Nevertheless, at over 90,000 members, this is the largest subreddit dedicated to all issues related to Artificial Intelligence or AI. You’ll mostly find the latest news and examples of AI in practice, but you’ll also notice some discussion and questions from those working in the field, or studying it. It’s definitely worth joining to keep on top of the latest AI stories from around the world.
The lack of rules in the r/ArtificalIntelligence sub let it down. It’s worth joining for the odd piece of news, but it’s mainly full of ads and announcements about the AI-powered products people are working on. And it’s not just us – there have been posts complaining about the lack of moderation.
Another anarchic sub is r/Automate, but there are more worthwhile posts to check out here. The most popular posts are videos on AI in action, like this automated commercial kitchen or this machine balancing an inverted triple pendulum. The engagement is relatively low, and there aren’t any stickied posts, but the posts are relevant and interesting, so we’d say it’s worth joining.
This sub isn’t strictly an AI subreddit, but the topics it covers tend to be AI-related. It focuses on ‘growing dissatisfaction with the utopian tech-porn dominating Futurology.’ However you look at it, lots of the posts you’ll see on here are AI-driven, like wearable face projectors to avoid face recognition and YouTube’s AI deleting videos of robots fighting because of ‘animal cruelty’.
Again, this sub isn’t strictly an AI subreddit, but it’s so closely linked that we thought it was worth including. This is, by far, the largest sub in our list, but it’s got lots of rules and has active mods. There’s a weekly tech support discussion thread and AI-related posts definitely pop up quite often.
This sub is all about technological singularity and related topics, including AI. The engagement isn’t that high, but the posts are of high quality and are nearly always relevant. Our animation team were particularly impressed with this lifelike human eye animation.
This sub is specific to machine learning (a subfield of AI) but as it’s so closely linked and such a good sub, we wanted to include it here. The mods are active, implementing six, specific rules and a weekly WAYR (What Are You Reading) sticky post. The posts are technical and interesting, and you’re likely to learn a lot just by joining the sub and reading the top posts. We also enjoyed this ‘unsupervised image-to-image translation method’.
Another slightly tangential sub, r/compsci is for anyone who wants to share and discuss content that computer scientists find interesting. Naturally, this often includes posts relating to AI. There are four rules, all of which are easy to abide and keep posts on track. You won’t see as many AI-specific posts, but there’s certainly enough here to keep you occupied.