Which Reddit posts rank higher in their own subreddit? What 140 million posts show

I’ve seen recurring advice on how to get upvoted on Reddit, often including tips like using “questions in headlines,” including a number in your headline, and posting a picture. I wanted to know if those things actually get you upvotes (or at least, if they show up among the things that do). So I turned to the data to find out.

In this analysis, I used 140,778,847 posts from October 2025 through September 2026, spanning 14,598 subreddits. Those are only the posts that were still visible when the source recorded them, which is usually about 36 hours after the posts were made, based on the source’s collection schedule. Only subreddits where a hundred or more of these posts were made each month were included.

Raw upvote counts aren’t very useful for comparing posts between different subreddits. But a narrower question might be: how well did a post do within its own subreddit and month?

Which posts rank higher inside their own subreddit?

Posts are percentile-ranked within each subreddit-month; being in the top 10% means they’re better than 90% of other posts in that subreddit-month.

Posts with and without a given feature are both percentile-ranked inside the same subreddit, and inside the same month. So if you have a cooking subreddit video, you only compete against other posts in that subreddit, not (say) memes elsewhere. The “score” here is the number Reddit shows next to each post, which is something like upvotes minus downvotes.

Do image and video posts rank higher than text posts?

Note that “video” here means Reddit-hosted video only; YouTube links and the like are considered links.

Video and image posts are compared to text posts of the same subreddits.

Reddit-hosted posts include galleries, reddit.com links without the image flag, but probably mostly galleries, and I haven't checked. The average percentile is close to images, but the top-10% share is a bit lower, 12.8% vs 14.5%.

It’s not just a few giant subreddits. Even excluding the ten largest subreddits, video is 4.3× as likely as text to reach the top 10%, compared to 4.2× including them. Visible video outranks visible text on average in 94.2% of subreddits where both are visible (at least 20 posts of each), compared to 95.7% for images on the same comparison.

I should say that the “claim” I’m making here, that videos are about four times as likely as text to reach the top 10%, is loose, and the raw share ratio is actually 4.2. It’s 5.3 if we require each subreddit to have at least two hundred posts of each type to qualify. And it’s 8.1 if we weight every subreddit equally. Images swing similarly.

The denominator is small here: in these subreddits, text posts reached the top 10% only 3.6% of the time. Pooled together across all subreddits, the rate for text posts rises to 5.4%. At the 200-post cutoff, the gap is 12.4 points. It’s 15.9 when subreddits are weighted equally, and 11.5 in the main comparison.

When all subreddits are pooled together and there is no matching, the multiple falls to 2.8 for video and 2.6 for images. This is pooling across subreddits, rather than within them. One possible reason, though unmeasured, is that many subreddits are mostly or only text posts.

There is one partly hidden gap here. Removed posts don’t show up in the rankings at all, but their share differs by content type.

Within the same subreddits, the gap in removed or deleted posts between the two categories is smaller, and each community is only counted once. Video posts are removed or deleted 4.6 points less often than text posts. Image posts are removed or deleted 1.9 points less often. Link posts are removed or deleted 7.4 points more often.

For the link comparison, I only include subreddits with at least 20 posts of each format, and removed posts are counted. This fits the scenario where the lead for links fails later.

In this check, I only look at one scenario, where removed posts are ranked in their own subreddit, and removed posts rank the worst. The ranks of surviving posts do not get recomputed, and then the comparison is run again. Videos and images stay ahead of text, but links lose their lead. Links are not ranked above or below text.

Try itWhat does well in a subreddit you pick, who writes there and when to post: Subreddits

Do question marks, numbers or capital letters in a title go with higher ranks?

Titles with question marks rank lower, when looking at the same set of subreddits: images, video, links and Reddit-hosted posts have a percentile deficit of about five to six percent relative to titles without question marks. Text posts have a gap close to zero.

Here are the title features for each post type, grouped by subreddits (each subreddit is counted once).

In text posts only, the gap for question-mark is small, about a third of a point on average percentile, and 0.6 points lower in the share in the top 10%. The pooled median gap is -0.6 points, and the interval includes zero. It’s -1.3 without the 10 biggest subreddits, and that interval doesn’t include zero. One could argue either way about whether that’s practically zero; I chose the one-point cutoff after seeing the initial results, so there’s no real verdict either way.

Digits and capitalised words are each under a point on average percentile, across text, video, and image posts, including those hosted by Reddit. The exception is link posts, where digit is 2.5 points and capitals is -1.1, and they’re in the same direction in both measures.

Elsewhere, average percentile and share in the top 10% don’t always agree, such as capitals for video and image posts. So I’m not reporting an overall direction.

Do emoji and the [OC] tag go with higher ranks?

Emoji go with higher ranks in image, video and Reddit-hosted posts, about one to four points. It’s the reverse in link posts, where emoji go with lower ranks. In text posts, average percentile barely differs (a quarter of a point), but emoji raise top 10% share by 2.4 points. The measures disagree on magnitude there, so no verdict is given.

But if all posts are pooled together, the emoji gap is far bigger. Emoji titles are 8.3 points higher in median percentile. One possible unmeasured reason: Most posts with emoji aren’t text posts.

You might expect emoji to track lower ranks beforehand, but for the most part, that isn’t the case. The [OC] tag is positive across all posts, but among text posts, the sign flips. That flip rests on a handful of subreddits and a handful of live-check posts, so [OC] remains uncalled.

Does title length matter?

There are 14,598 subreddits in play, pooled together from October 2025 through September 2026, and only visible posts are included in this analysis. Titles 20 characters long or shorter reach the top 10% of their subreddit 8.4% of the time, while titles with more than 200 characters do so 10.8% of the time. Those numbers mix all post types together, so it’s not exactly like-for-like.

Here’s a look at the fraction in the top 10%, by headline length, for all subreddits combined.

Pooled together, the difference between the longest and shortest titles is about two points, which is small compared to the differences between different post types or subreddits. Since I’m not claiming any particular direction for this variable, I don’t think it’s worth splitting out further, but keep in mind that these pooled titles are a mix of post types and subreddits, so they aren’t directly comparable to the other analyses.

Do longer text posts rank higher?

If you look at just text posts, and compare the same subreddits, you find that 8.8% of text posts with 1,001 to 5,000 characters made it to the top 10%, versus 3.9% of text posts with 1 to 500 characters, a gap of about 4.8 percentage points (or 8.77% vs 3.93% if you don’t round up). One possible reason, which I can’t measure, is that longer posts might be of a different kind than shorter ones.

If you weight each subreddit equally, longer posts tend to average about 6.8 points ahead of shorter ones. And in almost nine of every ten subreddits (88.5%), longer posts are ahead.

The pooled line dips at the very shortest posts, and then climbs back up.

How big is the posting-hour gap next to the others?

The posting hour is just being used as a yardstick here, it’s small compared to the other gaps. All subreddits pooled, the median percentile gap between the best and worst four-hour window is only 0.8 points. The gap between video and text posts, at the extremes of the post-type range, is 17.6 points. The pooled median was calculated from a histogram with two-point bins. The sub-point gap is within the precision.

Here’s the share in the top 10%, per posting hour, for subreddits pooled.

But what about timing inside one subreddit? That’s a different question. I examined those separately, and published an article on the best time to post to each subreddit on Reddit.

Can a score recorded about 36 hours after posting be trusted?

For this analysis, I used 30,000 posts from 100 randomly chosen subreddits, over three months. Within each subreddit and month, I recorded the scores and compared them to the values recorded by Reddit on November 4, 2026. Of these, 23,473 were still visible, and had a median rank correlation of 0.98 with the Reddit recorded value.

The breakdown by month follows the same pattern.

Of these, 93.2% of the ones that were in the recorded top 10% of posts and were still visible when I checked were still in the live top 10%. (This is a count of survivors, not including posts that vanished.)

Overall, 21.8% of the sample had vanished by the time I checked. These vanished disproportionately from the bottom: roughly a third of the lowest quarter were gone, but only about an eighth of the highest quarter.

All of these findings are only for posts that survived long enough to be recorded. The ranking of posts that have vanished is unknown.

So what should you take from this?

My read is that format seems to be tracked more reliably than any particular title feature I tested, like question mark, digit, caps, or emoji, or even length. Videos and images are much more likely to hit the monthly top 10% than text, even within the same subreddit. And longer text posts tend to rank higher than shorter ones.

The presence of a question mark seems to be bad news for non-text posts.

Note that this analysis shows only what’s visible when a post lands, and says nothing about how changing some aspect of a post affects its chances of reaching that point. For example, same-subreddit photo posts vs. text posts might differ in terms of what they’re about or who wrote them.

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

What Reddit ranking questions do you have? What data should I try to tackle next?

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.

Questions people ask

The data

• CSVPost types against text, same subredditsEach post type against text posts in subreddits with 20+ posts of both: top-10% shares (%), ratio with 95% interval, share of subreddits where the type ranks higher.
• CSVTitle features inside each post typeAverage-percentile gap for emoji, question marks, digits and words in capitals, inside each post type, each subreddit counted once, with 95% intervals.
• CSVRemoved posts by typePosts, removed or deleted posts and the share removed, by post type.
• CSVTop-10% share by post type, pooledPooled across all subreddits, not matched inside a subreddit: share of each post type in the top 10%, with 95% intervals.
• CSVTop-10% share by body length, pooledText posts, pooled across all subreddits: share in the top 10% by body length in characters, with 95% intervals.
• CSVTop-10% share by title length, pooledAll posts, pooled across all subreddits: share in the top 10% by title length, with 95% intervals.
• CSVTop-10% share by title length, text posts, pooledText posts only, pooled across all subreddits: share in the top 10% by title length, with 95% intervals.
• CSVTop-10% share by posting hour, pooledAll posts, pooled across all subreddits: share in the top 10% by posting hour (UTC), with 95% intervals.
• CSVTitle features, all posts, pooledPooled across all subreddits and post types: median-percentile gap for each title feature, with 95% intervals.
• CSVTitle features, text posts, pooledText posts only, pooled across all subreddits: median-percentile gap for each title feature, with 95% intervals.
• CSVSpread by feature, pooledPooled across all subreddits: spread of the median percentile between each feature's levels, in points.
• CSVLive check by monthMedian rank correlation of recorded and live scores inside each subreddit, by month.
• PNGMain chart, 1600 × 1000Post types against text posts in the same subreddits, as an image.

Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24142947