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r/PhD

284K members. The best post we have captured here reached 4.4K upvotes, which works out to 16 per 1,000 members.

16peak upvotes per 1,000 members
284Kmembers
4.4Kbest post
205most comments
303posts we track

Open r/PhD on Reddit β†—

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% 8%
Text 57% Question 34% Image 8%

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 107 Seeking advice-personal 56 Big Decision Energy 32 Getting Shit Done 27 Vent (NO ADVICE) 19 🐸 πŸŽ‰FROG TIMEπŸŽ‰πŸΈ 12 Seeking advice-social 11 Resource sharing 9 Publishing Woes 8 Tool Talk 6

What the ceiling looks like

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

Never give your unpublished data or research ideas to AI models!

↑ 4.4K πŸ’¬ 176 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 πŸ’¬ 63 image 2026

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

↑ 1.4K πŸ’¬ 205 image 2026

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

↑ 1.3K πŸ’¬ 84 image 2026

I got my PhD degree today. I feel absolutely NOTHING

↑ 976 πŸ’¬ 135 text 2026

When the journal asks for your ORCID but your affiliation is Mordor

↑ 761 πŸ’¬ 21 image 2026

I just quit my PhD

↑ 724 πŸ’¬ 162 text 2026

How it feels doing the final bits of my thesis

↑ 722 πŸ’¬ 7 image 2026

I'm starting my PhD this month!

↑ 661 πŸ’¬ 49 image 2026

I have successfully passed my dissertation proposal defense with flying colors

↑ 652 πŸ’¬ 23 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 284K members. ViralHunt has tracked 303 of its posts; the biggest reached 4.4K upvotes, which is 16 per 1,000 members.
What is the most viral post on r/PhD?
"Never give your unpublished data or research ideas to AI models!" reached 4.4K upvotes and 176 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/Global_News_Hub, r/FBI, r/Trumpvirus, r/alaska, r/Whistleblowers, r/Louisiana.
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 303 timestamped posts we hold, the slots whose posts averaged the highest score are Thursday at 13:00 UTC (328 avg upvotes), Tuesday at 15:00 UTC (183 avg upvotes), Tuesday at 14:00 UTC (163 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 359 upvotes, so that is roughly the bar for the top twenty. We captured 303 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.

Start free β†’

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.