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r/PhD

This community is private, banned or no longer exists on Reddit. The numbers below are what we captured while it was public.

290.6K members. The best post we have captured here reached 25.8K upvotes, which works out to 89 per 1,000 members.

89peak upvotes per 1,000 members
290.6Kmembers
25.8Kbest post
1Kmost comments
733posts we track

Open r/PhD 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.

57% 34%
Text 57% Question 34% Image 7% Link 1% Gallery 1%

The topics it labels

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

Seeking advice-academic 247 Seeking advice-personal 154 Big Decision Energy 64 Vent (NO ADVICE) 58 Getting Shit Done 49 🐸 🎉FROG TIME🎉🐸 28 Seeking advice-social 27 Resource sharing 19 Money 18 Tool Talk 15

What the ceiling looks like

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

Accurate

↑ 25.8K 💬 420 image 2026

Is this fraudulent system of publishing business ever going to stop?

↑ 6.6K 💬 330 image 2026

Never give your unpublished data or research ideas to AI models!

↑ 4.4K 💬 176 image 2026

Research Proposal vs PhD Thesis

↑ 4.1K 💬 36 image 2026

A tattoo I feel you all will appreciate

↑ 3.7K 💬 137 image 2026

Alexandra Elbakyan for Nobel Peace

↑ 2K 💬 90 image 2026

Based on a true story

↑ 1.9K 💬 52 image 2026

Put on my big girls pants and told my supervisor that I need a break because my mental health is in the toilet. With all the horror stories we hear a…

↑ 1.5K 💬 63 image 2026

What talk you went to that made you want to react like that

↑ 1.4K 💬 205 image 2026

Rarest sight in academia (research article based on mol bio on a journal with IF>4).

↑ 1.3K 💬 84 image 2026

Communities its size

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

r/PhD, in numbers

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

How many members does r/PhD have?
r/PhD has about 290.6K members. ViralHunt has tracked 733 of its posts; the biggest reached 25.8K upvotes, which is 89 per 1,000 members.
What is the most viral post on r/PhD?
"Accurate" reached 25.8K upvotes and 420 comments in 2026, the highest score among the posts we hold from r/PhD.
What subreddits are similar to r/PhD?
Communities of a comparable size we track: r/Trumpvirus, r/alaska, r/Louisiana, r/popculture, r/Antimoneymemes, r/BlueskySkeets.
What kind of posts do best on r/PhD?
Of the posts we hold, 57% are text posts and 34% are question posts.
When is the best time to post on r/PhD?
Across 733 timestamped posts we hold, the slots whose posts averaged the highest score are Saturday at 13:00 UTC (5.2K avg upvotes), Tuesday at 06:00 UTC (2K avg upvotes), Wednesday at 09:00 UTC (1.5K avg upvotes). The busiest day is Thursday. 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/PhD?
The 20th-best post we hold from r/PhD has 661 upvotes, so that is roughly the bar for the top twenty. We captured 427 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/PhD, 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.