We believe that humanity’s greatest lessons are taught by time. Our cultural exhaust leaves a legible pattern to better understand how we adapt, find meaning, and retain the concept of what makes us human. From diction to design, Time&Again provides research built upon trials and successes of past and present using frontier tools while holding close, the intuition and thought systems that brought us all here.
Reading the rooms in Reddit Report No. 01. How 47 Reddit rooms talk, from r/instacart to r/relationship_advice: 33,839 comments measured for length, voice and who is talking, and 1,179,387 posts sorted by topic.
Close Friends Only Game Show A live game show where friends share their inside jokes for outside rewards. Each show is also a field site for our research.
GOSSIP An open platform that publishes a daily count of public conversation across eight domains of culture, free to use.
Supp An app that gives a group of friends three shared prompts a day.
Method
Every study runs on public data: the posts and comments of an online room, the words a group coins, the records earlier groups kept. We apply the same measures to every group, read a sample a second time, and date every number. Each finding is published with the count behind it.
1 of 4 · CollectWe gather what groups leave in public, from the walls of Lascaux to this week’s posts, and log the source and date of every piece.
2 of 4 · CodeEvery piece is coded under one set of rules, here as a custom, a ritual or a tie, so a room of 69 thousand and a room of 15 million can be compared.
3 of 4 · CheckOne piece in ten is read a second time with its source hidden, and we report how often the two readings agree. GOSSIP’s daily counts and the rooms we run give a second source.
4 of 4 · PublishEach report gives its counts, shares and medians, the date its data was built and what it can’t answer.
Standards
We publish counts, shares and medians. No one’s post or comment is quoted.
Every number carries the date its data was built.
Every group in a study is measured the same way, so groups of any size can be compared.
Each report states what its evidence can’t answer, next to what it found.
Nothing about you from a room we run is published without your written consent.
Reports and their methods are free to read and share under CC BY 4.0.
Work with us
Commissioned studies for companies and venues. We measure what your audience already says and does in public and report it in counts, shares and change over time. Tell us what you want to know.
