Lost Threads: My Attempt to find the Poetry of Human Connection Amidst Digital Chaos
First off: to set some expectations, I am not a data scientist, but I am an engineer and a poet. Everything I will talk about here has come about through lots of guessing at things. Which, I suppose, is kind of data science anyway. So I retract my statement. If guessing is the thing, I’m a brilliant data scientist.
I browse Reddit a lot. I have mixed feelings. There are strange things about it like… redditors seem to universally hate dogs? Why?
What I have seen, though, is occasional flashes of deep humanity. A fragile second where an echo of what should connect us all manages to pierce through the static.
Some background - earlier this year I built a custom Reddit haiku viewer that lets me pull in batches of haiku from r/Haiku and view them in a custom viewer with some basic annotations. I did this so I could “bookmark” where I was because I wanted to read them all. (side note, if you’re wondering why, reddit haiku is a major source of my own inspiration. They have an ambition and simple purity to them that cuts through everything and goes straight into the heart).
I got this working and found I also liked reading comments on those same haiku. There is a sort of temporal cast of characters that appears. A sliding window of who is in focus as people come and go. There was support, craft discussion, and of course some moderator-induced drama. I began to see the branches of activity; the subtle buds of some sort of connection growing despite the void.
This was profoundly beautiful to me. I fell in love with it.
I wanted more. I wanted to find those other flickers of humanity. Long story short, I built this:
This dashboard shows the beating heart of the system - a crawler and classifier for Reddit posts. It's also a machine for discovering accidental literature: micro-narratives, anonymous confessions, threads where something breaks through the noise and becomes almost mythic. I've built it to recognize not virality, but vulnerability; not drama, but emotional architecture.
I don’t want to waste your time breaking it all down. But it works, well — as much as anything could hope to catalog the shifting spectrum of human interaction.
To be clear, I don’t give a flip about what’s trending, scores on posts, etc. In fact, I specifically remove big subs like AskReddit from consideration entirely. I am looking for those small moments where humans are connecting.
My journey has been incredible. Many fine evenings have been spent drinking wine while I laugh and cry with strangers across time and distance. More importantly, though, the raw unfiltered hope helps keep me inspired.
What’s next? Not sure. I intended to do a YouTube series where I talk about what I find, but hearing my voice recorded is too weird for me. I’m still figuring it out. But maybe it’s enough to just be a person that is watching and appreciating these things; honoring them in my own way before they trail off into the void forever.
Here are some examples of what I have found, and continue to find:
https://reddit.com/r/ReefTank/comments/1lqfww7/help_please_no_judgement/
https://reddit.com/r/kpop_uncensored/comments/1lpnjvu/this_may_be_a_hard_pill_to_swallow/
https://reddit.com/r/NarcissisticAbuse/comments/1lpvbsc/whats_the_best_advice_youve_received/
In case you want to go further into the rabbit hole, I have uploaded the documentation I created while building and refining it HERE.