What is Reddit used for? The topics people post about, by share of posts

If you ask five people what Reddit is for, you’ll probably get five different answers: “games”, “news”, “settling a dispute about a recipe”. I think each of those answers is correct, in that they describe some subsection of Reddit. The goal of this view of Reddit is to see the whole room.

Before I show any figures, there’s a caveat I have to lay out, because it’ll frame everything that follows, so here it is up front: the data used in this article isn’t of every post on Reddit. It’s only English text posts, with no 18+ flag, no video, and wasn’t removed. And it has to pass a quality floor, which is built on votes, and is called the topic layer. This set is a minority of all posts on Reddit. You can see Reddit’s scale in the number of subreddits, and the size of the minority in the following section.

What is Reddit mostly used for?

Here are the posts split across all groups.

Attempts to dethrone Games have failed; it’s still first in both the first and second halves of the year. It’s still first even if you include bots in the calculation, though there aren’t that many bots in the layer (only about half a percent) so not much changes. And it’s still first even if you remove the biggest piece of the puzzle, Action Games.

After that, ordering after Games gets a lot less trustworthy, but Internet Culture is followed by Movies & TV as the next biggest topics in the layer. Note that this layer only includes posts that got some votes. One possible cause (though I can’t measure this) is that there are lots of advice and help threads that get very few votes, and those would be smaller than they really are here. Again, no position besides the top one is worth relying on.

Groups is another way to slice topics, and on this map, Internet Culture is grouped with Animals & Pets. That’s a pretty surprising grouping, but if you change the split, the order changes.

Try itThe subreddits where people in your topic actually write, found by what they talk about: Find Subs

Which topics have the most posters, not just the most posts?

posts and people are different measures, so they needn’t necessarily match; it’s possible for one person to be very active and create hundreds of posts. The number of authors is also shown.

Before I show you the next part of the data, there’s a caveat to keep in mind: an author is only counted once for each group they posted in. The average author is active in around two groups. As a result, the shares below don’t sum to one whole, and therefore can’t be compared directly with the shares for posts. They answer a different question.

Games is again the leading topic, this time the bars represent the share of people who have written at least one post in a group on the given topic.

Try itWhat a whole group of subreddits in your topic talks about and asks for: Audiences

How has the mix of topics changed since 2012?

I was hoping that part would give me a tidy narrative, but nothing came up.

No matter what year I chose as the beginning of my look at topic layer change, games had become a bigger share of topic layer, and they’d be an even bigger share in 2025, with the difference ranging from 2.1 to 7.3 percentage points.

Here’s games versus internet culture, year by year.

Games’ share of the topic has increased in most years, though it dips in 2021, 2022 and 2024. Internet Culture’s share fluctuates up and down, but its shrinkage is mostly determined by what year you choose to start from. The topics that are losing ground are not ranked here.

There’s a deeper problem underneath: the pool of posts that enter this layer has changed over the years. Across all Reddit posts (excluding bots), only about a twentieth were flagged 18+ in 2012. In 2025, that share is over four-tenths, or 42.3%.

If you look at the distribution of removal marks by year, there are none for posts in 2012, but 18.8% of posts in 2025 are flagged. The mark only appears in the data starting in 2019. This gap may be partly due to an artifact of how records were kept in the past, rather than actual removals.

Both kinds of posts are excluded from this layer. There is a “mix shift” across those years, some of which is due to a change in topic and some of which is due to a change in what kinds of posts were included in the data. The data can’t tease those apart.

But games have been trending up no matter what starting year I tried, so the claim about growth seems pretty safe. The yearly figures for the other groups are in the CSV, but they shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

How much of Reddit does this cover?

Not most of Reddit. From October 2025 through September 2026, 13.4% of all posts (bots excluded) made it into the topic layer, which is about one in seven.

Where did all the posts of those months go? (Tallied under the “earliest” removing filter.)

The largest category is posts that were flagged as 18+, at 37.1% of all posts. Removed or deleted posts are second. Order matters here: if a post was both removed and flagged as adult, it’s tallied under removed only, because the removing filter is applied first.

This peaked at 21.6% in 2013, but has been a minority of posts every year since. These figures are for English text on Reddit only, so they don’t give a full picture of the platform. You should therefore avoid quoting any of these figures as “the share of all of Reddit”.

So what is Reddit used for?

One way to think about this is the topic layer: what people write about. Games are far ahead here. In October 2025 to September 2026, they made up around a fifth of posts. Around about three tenths of active authors have written about games at least once in that period.

The question of why people open the app can’t be answered here. All I have access to is posts and their authors, there’s nothing on people who read but don’t write. The geography of Reddit users is covered in Reddit users by country.

Find Subs, a subreddit finder to find where people who care about a particular topic hang out, is the place to find out where people interested in a particular subject post. There are other Reddit questions that could be answered with this kind of data; if you have a request for a particular question, let me know. It might just become the next installment.

What this data can't tell you

Method

Planned before looking, and found while analysing

Conflict of interest: KissMyPost makes Reddit research tools. Funding: none.

Corrections: contact me; each fix gets a dated note on this page.

Questions people ask

The data

• CSVGroups by share of postsAll 29 topic groups with post counts and share of topic-layer posts, October 2025 through September 2026.
• CSVGroups by share of authorsTop ten topic groups by share of active authors who posted in them at least once.
• CSVWhere all posts goAll posts of the window by the first filter that removed them, with counts and shares.
• CSVCoverage by yearShare of all Reddit posts in the topic layer, 2008 to 2025, with the yearly total.
• CSVChange by group, 2012 to 2025Each group's share in 2012 and 2025 and the change in points; the layer is selected differently in the two years.
• CSVGames change by base yearChange in the Games share to 2025 from each base year, 2011 to 2016.
• CSVGames by yearShare of topic-layer posts about games, by year.
• CSVInternet Culture by yearShare of topic-layer posts in Internet Culture, by year.
• PNGMain chart as an imageShare of topic-layer posts by topic group, as an image.

Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24238175