Mappedit

Visualizing location-based subreddits on a map

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Inspiration

As a regular reddit user, I have always been interested in visualizing subreddit metadata. I believe people would find Mappedit useful for joining discussions about their local areas and for getting advice from local redditors when moving to a new area.

What it does

Mappedit plots location-based subreddits (such as r/California, r/NYC, etc.,) on a map. You can view the data either as a scatterplot or a text map. Bigger items mean larger subreddits (by number of subscribers). Darker items mean that the subreddit has not been recently active.

How we built it

I gathered the list of subreddits from r/LocationReddits and ran them through the Google Maps Geocoding API to get location coordinates. I used the Maps JavaScript API along with deck.gl's ScatterPlot and Text layers to visualize these subreddits on the map.

Challenges we ran into

Since I was unfamiliar with deck.gl, it was a bit of a learning curve.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It is nice to see all location-based subreddits plotted on a map. We are able to tell, at a glance, which regions are more active on reddit.

What we learned

I learned deck.gl and how to use it with Google Maps Javascript API

What's next for Mappedit

  • I would like to allow users add missing or newly-created subreddits
  • It would be great to also allow others to suggest corrections to existing data

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