One Million Reddit Comments from 40 Subreddits, Balanced for Categorical Analysis

An extract of 1 million comments from the pushshift.io archive of all Reddit comments from May 2019. The data includes 25,000 comments from each of the 40 most frequented subreddits for that month, with removed, deleted, and very short comments excluded. It was created by an individual contributor and is shared under a CC0 public domain license.

Use Cases

• Train or benchmark text classification models based on the 'subreddit' categorical label.
• Analyze comment sentiment or controversy based on the 'score' and 'controversiality' features.
• Study linguistic patterns and online discourse across different communities using the 'body' text field.

Strengths

• Contains 1 million total comments, with 25,000 comments from each of 40 subreddits, providing balanced class representation.
• Includes multiple feature types: categorical ('subreddit'), text ('body'), binary ('controversiality'), and scalar ('score').
• Pre-filtered to exclude removed comments, deleted authors, and comments with fewer than 4 tokens.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• Data may reflect temporal and platform bias inherent to a single month (May 2019) of Reddit activity.

Provenance

Source

pushshift.io

Collection Method

Extracted and filtered from the complete May 2019 Reddit comments archive.

Time Range

May 2019