Set a clear inclusion rule for related communities.
Category analysis
AI, read as
one field.
Oscylo categories organize related public communities into a comparable signal. AI is the first public example: a view of how attention moves across an entire field over time, and where it concentrates.
- Feature
- Category related communities, one view
- Public example
- AI 16-community comparative panel
- Example movement
- 2.72× September baseline
What is a category?
A defined set of communities, measured as one comparative field.
A category is an analytical grouping—not a platform label. It combines communities that share a market, topic, technology, or behavior, then normalizes their movement so changes can be compared without letting the largest community dominate the story.
Use a common baseline to compare relative movement.
Read the category beside a relevant reference group.
Worked example / AI
One baseline.
Two different curves.
Indexed weekly visitor signalAI communities versus non-AI technology
AITechnology, excluding AI
Baseline: week of Sept. 8, 2025 = 100. The lines connect dated category readings and are designed for relative comparison, not causal attribution.
This is a descriptive index of selected communities. It is not a measure of all AI interest on Reddit and does not establish why attention changed.
Inside the AI example
A field is broader than its flagship names.
The AI example spans product, development, research, learning, culture, and critique. That diversity makes the category useful: it shows whether movement is concentrated in one brand or distributed across the field.
Communities organized around major AI assistants and model providers.
Examples include r/ChatGPT, r/ClaudeAI, and r/OpenAI.
Technical communities where models, tooling, and local workflows are discussed.
Examples include r/LocalLLaMA and r/StableDiffusion.
Communities focused on machine learning practice, education, and research.
Examples include r/MachineLearning and r/learnmachinelearning.
Communities examining how AI media is made, identified, received, and challenged.
The comparative panel includes both enthusiastic and critical communities.
Analytical breadth
Built for questions that cross community boundaries.
A broader analytical foundation sits behind every public brief. Public activity is transformed into community-level measures that support questions a short leaderboard cannot answer.
- Archive size
- 2.4M complete Monday–Sunday community-weeks on record
- History per community
- 364 weeks median history per community, about seven years
- Record reach
- Back to 2005 weekly totals reconstructed from public data
Scale figures describe historical depth, community breadth, and window construction. Oscylo’s analytical datasets contain community-level measures and time series—not post text, comment text, usernames, profiles, or individual contributions.
How to read a category
A comparative lens, with its limits left visible.
Reddit defines weekly visitors as unique users who visited a community in the past seven days, presented using a 28-day rolling average. The measure excludes bots and visitors using anonymous browsing mode in Reddit’s native apps. Review Reddit’s definition.
Both category lines begin at 100, so the chart compares relative movement rather than audience size. A larger index does not mean the AI category has a larger absolute audience than technology.
Oscylo’s analytical datasets contain aggregate community measures and time series, not post text, comment text, usernames, user profiles, or individual contributions.
Build the category you need
Move from one public example to a research-ready category view.
The private beta extends category analysis with longer histories, community-level comparisons, additional groupings, and reusable analytical outputs.