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What Is Reddit Scared of?

Ranking the Most Popular Phobia Subreddits

What fears do we share with the others around us? A particular type of fear that I find especially interesting are phobias, or an irrational fear of something that’s unlikely to cause harm.

If you were to try to learn more about phobias on Google, all that comes up are a bunch of generic “Top 10” lists based on therapist interviews. I wanted to take a more data-driven approach to rank phobias, and Reddit is the perfect source to give us insight into the most engaging fears that we share.

Source: Google

What data am I using?

1. List of phobia subreddits: I found this text file of over 1 million subreddits created by Reddit user orgnohpxf in 2018. Using this list as an exhaustive source of truth, I filtered for subreddits with ‘phobia’ in the name for a total of 337 subreddits.
2. Subreddit Metadata: I use Reddit’s API in order to get metadata on the 337 subreddits above: title, description, public_description, subscribers, active_user_count, quarantine, over18.

The Top 10