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r/labratsNSFW

A hangout for lab nerds!. Welcome to r/LabRats! A space for scientists, researchers, and lab workers to share experiment fails, lab wins, and PI woes. Do you need advice, a place to vent, or just some lab-life humor? Want to share your big successes, your awesome protocols, and tricks of the trade? Join your fellow labrats. We also have a discord server! https://discord.gg/385mCqr Founded 2011 · 726.3K members

728K members. The best post we have captured here reached 10.7K upvotes, which works out to 15 per 1,000 members.

15peak upvotes per 1,000 members
728Kmembers
10.7Kbest post
1.3Kmost comments
408posts we track

Open r/labrats on Reddit ↗

What actually lands here

The mix of post types among everything we have captured. Posting a link where almost nothing but images lands is wasted effort, and this is the fastest way to see it.

34% 30% 20% 8%
Text 34% Image 30% Question 20% Link 8% Gallery 5% Video 2%

The topics it labels

Flairs are the community's own categories, and the closest thing a subreddit has to telling you what it wants.

Mods are always watching 1

What the ceiling looks like

The biggest posts we have captured here. Links go to the original on Reddit.

Cryopreservation differences

↑ 10.7K 💬 84 image 2025

I swear the E.coli isn't woke

↑ 10.1K 💬 185 image 2025

Glove problems

↑ 10.1K 💬 89 image 2023

🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦

↑ 9.3K 💬 254 image 2022

MD Anderson clinical trials now halted under Trump admin. (At what point do we strike?)

↑ 9.2K 💬 306 image 2025

Academia...

↑ 8.6K 💬 192 image 2021

I saw your cute 5mL beakers, and I raise you this comically large syringe.

↑ 8.3K 💬 215 image 2026

lab strains unite!

↑ 8K 💬 68 image 2021

To My Fellow Lab Rats: A Letter From a Postdoc Who Survived the Bolsonaro Years

↑ 7.9K 💬 156 text 2025

I present to you: the best science scene in any movie ever (mega shark vs giant octopus 2009)

↑ 7.7K 💬 393 video 2022

Communities its size

Within four times the member count either way, so the comparison is fair. Sorted by upside.

r/labrats, in numbers

Answered from the posts ViralHunt holds from this community, not from Reddit's own about page.

What is r/labrats?
r/labrats ("A hangout for lab nerds!") describes itself this way: Welcome to r/LabRats! A space for scientists, researchers, and lab workers to share experiment fails, lab wins, and PI woes. Do you need advice, a place to vent, or just some lab-life humor? Want to share your big successes, your awesome protocols, and tricks of the trade? Join your fellow labrats. We also have a discord server! https://discord.gg/385mCqr. It was founded in 2011 and has 726.3K members.
How many members does r/labrats have?
r/labrats has about 728K members. ViralHunt has tracked 408 of its posts; the biggest reached 10.7K upvotes, which is 15 per 1,000 members.
What is the most viral post on r/labrats?
"Cryopreservation differences" reached 10.7K upvotes and 84 comments in 2025, the highest score among the posts we hold from r/labrats.
What subreddits are similar to r/labrats?
Communities of a comparable size we track: r/popculture, r/ProgressiveHQ, r/StarWarsBattlefront, r/NoFilterNews, r/BlackPeopleofReddit, r/scotus.
What kind of posts do best on r/labrats?
Of the posts we hold, 34% are text posts and 30% are image posts.
When is the best time to post on r/labrats?
Across 408 timestamped posts we hold, the slots whose posts averaged the highest score are Monday at 13:00 UTC (4.6K avg upvotes), Saturday at 13:00 UTC (4.4K avg upvotes), Sunday at 22:00 UTC (4.3K avg upvotes). The busiest day is Friday. For Reddit as a whole, see the best time to post on Reddit page.
How many upvotes does a post need to reach the top of r/labrats?
The 20th-best post we hold from r/labrats has 6.3K upvotes, so that is roughly the bar for the top twenty. We captured 116 posts from it in the last 30 days.

See what is climbing here before you write

ViralHunt tracks Reddit and eight other networks, records how every post grows, and puts what is taking off in front of your team in one list.

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Every figure here is what ViralHunt has captured from r/labrats, not everything the community has ever posted. We deliberately do not publish an average score: our sample is weighted toward a community's best posts, so an average would be flattering and wrong. Peak per 1,000 members is computed the same way for every community listed. See how we measure.