On
Reddit there are a huge number of links submitted, however few ever get enough votes to make it to the front page of the site where most Reddit users will see it. A submission depends greatly on the title, however you only have one shot to get it right.
This is where
PredictReddit comes in. It allows you to test out your proposed title, giving you an estimate of the number of votes it is likely to get. So you can fine tune it before you submit it to Reddit. It uses past submissions to predict future votes. This of course assumes that the Reddit community is interested in similar recurring topics (and it seems to be).
There can be some confusion over the results it gives back. For example, if you type in a title that you know got a high number of votes and you get a low number of votes back. You might assume that
PredictReddit is broken, however in reality, if a story is very successful, often you find numerous other submissions trying to piggyback on its success (but they fail to get many votes). This gives a low predicted number of votes. Best to play around with it yourself and try it out. And remember its just for fun.
It works by using a k-Nearest Neighbours algorithm. It was written in PHP using the
Zend Framework. It uses MySQL for data storage. Data is pulled from Reddit using their json interface.
