Apparently the guy who started it edited his post to point to this analysis.

https://np.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/ia0ij/watching_fellows...

That's as meta as it gets

I could have sworn that Reddit prevented commenting and editing on post that are this old.

You can edit or delete any of your posts at any time.

Until recently, you could reply to or vote on any post or comment less than 6 months old, regardless of the age of its parent. A recent change prevented voting or commenting on any thread where the OP is at least 6 months old, even if the comment you want to interact with is newer than that.

HN, on the other hand, does prevent editing after some time.

About an hour in my experience. Pity as I often find glaring typos later.

Very cool. I remember back at Caltech when Adam D'Angelo wasn't a Quora founder and was just a hacker dude he made buddy zoo and it had these awesome social graphs. I think this was ported into the early version of facebook and didn't really end up doing that much because the graphs were very simple. Now that social networks have an older audience with a more complex social graph I think this type of stuff could be really useful (especially if you could create FB or other groups from it).

That feature was the main selling point for FB for me when I first signed up back in 2004. I have to assume I wasn't the only one!

Yes, I remember that graph back when I first joined FB in college (2005).

I loved seeing how my friend groups cluster. I could see my main two groups of friends, I could see the various clubs I was a member of, etc. I could even see when I started introducing my friends from different groups to each other, and they started to merge at the edges.

It was great, and I miss it. Unfortunately, I don't think it'd be very useful anymore since FB is no longer college-centric...

There's this cartoon to help explain. https://i.imgur.com/YSPsu.png

Hold my spreadsheet, I'm going in!

The visualization reminds me of MUD maps, such as this one for Discworld MUD's Ankh-Morpork: http://daftjunk.com/dw/Ankh-Morpork.png . This type of thing could be an interesting avenue for semi-organic map generation. :P

It's come a long way in the last three years:

https://uberpython.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/ah-the-old-reddi...

I really like the look of these types of graphs. Is the code used to produce them available anywhere?

(author here) The graphs are stock graphviz output, the linear layout is called "dot" (the default), and the nebulous layout is "sfdp". For your googling pleasure it's a "force directed graph layout", and there are many libraries to assist with it. d3.js has a force layout built in, for instance.

As far as I know, d3.js has force-directed but not "directed" force-directed like Sugiyama.

It's produced with a tool called Graphviz:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphviz

The main Graphviz website is down at the time of my posting this comment:

http://www.graphviz.org/

While the exact output options aren't immediately visible, the Imgur site says that Graphviz was used, in the tree layout, and a force directed layout (probably sfdp).