Data collected July 2026 — 34,095 posts, 50 subreddits, Reddit's public listings.
Ask ten Reddit guides what gets upvoted and you get ten versions of the same answer: post images, keep titles punchy, post in the morning. We crawled 34,095 posts across 50 subreddits to check, and the single biggest finding is that there is no one answer. What gets upvoted on Reddit depends on community size: discussion-driven text posts dominate the winning posts in small and mid-size subreddits, while image and link posts dominate the winners in communities with tens of millions of subscribers. The same post type that wins in one tier barely exists among winners in another.
Key takeaways
- Text posts make up 95.2% of winning posts in small subreddits but just 0.2% in mega subreddits. The "best post type" question has no global answer.
- Image posts are overrepresented among winners in every tier, most sharply in large subreddits, where they hold 7.5% of winning posts versus 3.1% of everything else.
- Winning posts are not slightly better than typical posts. Their median score is 4x to 13x the tier median, depending on tier.
- Winners in small subreddits earn 0.69 comments per point of score. In mega subreddits it is 0.03. Small-sub wins are conversations, mega-sub wins are spectacles.
- Post flair showed almost no difference between winners and everyone else in three of four tiers. Weekday differences were marginal. Two popular "hacks" that our data does not support.
How did we run this study?
We collected 34,095 posts from 50 subreddits using Reddit's public listings in July 2026. Posts span July 2023 to July 2026 and come from each subreddit's top of the year (14,807 posts), top of the month (10,756), hot (8,147), and new (385) listings. No private data, no API tricks, just what any logged-out visitor can see.
We grouped the 50 subreddits into four size tiers:
| Tier | Subreddits | Subscriber range | Posts collected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 14 | 24,437 to 3,292,585 | 7,528 |
| Mid | 13 | 272,543 to 4,507,510 | 9,234 |
| Large | 13 | 3,279,769 to 21,766,926 | 9,298 |
| Mega | 10 | 16,597,969 to 67,487,818 | 8,035 |
Tier boundaries overlap at the edges because we assigned communities by rank within our sample rather than fixed cutoffs, so read the tiers as "roughly this size class" rather than hard lines.
Inside each tier we split posts into winners, the top 10% by score, and the rest. The winner-versus-rest comparison covers 25,563 posts: 2,595 winners (603 small, 715 mid, 692 large, 585 mega) against 22,968 others. We report medians throughout because Reddit scores are heavily skewed and a handful of viral outliers would distort averages.
Three honest caveats before the findings. First, sampling from top and hot listings overrepresents successful posts, so "the rest" here is still more successful than a random new post. Second, scores are Reddit's displayed numbers, which the platform deliberately fuzzes. Reddit's help center also notes that vote counts are hidden entirely in a post's first hours. Third, everything below is correlation. The data shows what winning posts look like, not what caused them to win.
Does subreddit size change what gets upvoted?
Yes, completely. The post types that dominate winning posts in small communities almost vanish among winners in huge ones, and vice versa. Text holds 95.2% of winning posts in small subreddits, 53.0% in mid, 73.4% in large, and 0.2% in mega subreddits, where links and images take over.
Here is the full breakdown of what the top 10% of posts in each tier are made of:
| Post type share of winners | Small | Mid | Large | Mega |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | 95.2% | 53.0% | 73.4% | 0.2% |
| Image | 2.7% | 23.1% | 7.5% | 37.8% |
| Gallery | 0.3% | 17.6% | 8.7% | 1.4% |
| Link | 1.5% | 4.6% | 10.4% | 48.4% |
| Video | 0.3% | 1.7% | 0% recorded | 12.3% |
The tier inversion in one picture: text holds 95.2% of winning posts in small subreddits and 0.2% in mega subreddits — the format that dominates one tier barely exists among winners in another.
Read that top row again. If you took the advice "images and videos win on Reddit" and applied it to a 100K-subscriber community, you would be optimizing for 3% of what actually wins there. If you took "text posts build discussion" into a 40M-subscriber subreddit, you would be producing the single rarest winner type in the data, 1 in 500 winning posts.
Part of this is what each community allows and what its feed rewards, and part is audience behavior at different scales. Small communities are built around conversation between people who know the topic. Mega communities function more like broadcast media, where content is consumed in half a second of scrolling. If you have not consciously placed your content in one of these tiers, start there before touching anything else. You can browse communities by size with our subreddit list to see which tier you are actually posting into.
Which post types punch above their weight in each tier?
Image posts are the most consistently overrepresented type among winners. Comparing each type's share of winners against its share of all other posts in the same tier, images are overrepresented among winners in all four tiers: 2.4x in large subreddits, 2.3x in small, 1.4x in mid, and 1.1x in mega.
The standout numbers, winners versus the rest within each tier:
- Large subreddits: images are 7.5% of winners versus 3.1% of the rest, the biggest relative gap in the study. Text is slightly underrepresented among winners (73.4% vs 79.5%) even though it still dominates in absolute terms.
- Mid subreddits: link posts are 4.6% of winners versus 1.4% of the rest, a 3.3x overrepresentation, and images run 23.1% versus 16.9%. Text still leads winners at 53.0% but is below its 61.1% share of the rest.
- Small subreddits: text is table stakes at 95.2% of winners and 96.1% of the rest, so type is not the differentiator here. Images show 2.7% of winners versus 1.2% of the rest, but that is roughly 16 winning posts, too few to build a strategy on.
- Mega subreddits: the type mix of winners and the rest is nearly identical (links 48.4% vs 49.4%, video 12.3% vs 12.7%), with images the only type meaningfully overrepresented (37.8% vs 33.4%). The real signal is text: 0.2% of winners versus 2.2% of the rest. Text posts in mega subreddits exist, they just almost never win.
The practical read: in small subreddits, format cannot save you or sink you, the content itself decides. In mid and large subreddits, a strong visual is a genuine edge over the text-heavy baseline. In mega subreddits, format is the entry ticket and everyone already holds one.
How much bigger are winning posts than everything else?
Winning posts are not marginally better, they are a different category of outcome. The median winner scores 4.2x to 13.4x the median of all other posts in its tier, with the widest gap in large subreddits.
| Tier | Median winner score | Median score, the rest | Winner multiple | Median winner comments | Median comments, the rest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 86 | 10 | 8.6x | 59 | 17 |
| Mid | 710 | 119 | 6.0x | 195 | 46 |
| Large | 2,069.5 | 154 | 13.4x | 342 | 90 |
| Mega | 55,310 | 13,252.5 | 4.2x | 1,526 | 499.5 |
Two things worth absorbing here. First, calibrate your expectations to your tier. A 90-point post is a top-10% outcome in a small community and statistical noise in a mega one. If you have been judging your small-sub posts against front-page numbers, you have been grading yourself on the wrong curve. Our most upvoted Reddit posts breakdown covers what the extreme ceiling looks like, but the medians above are the honest benchmarks.
Second, the large-subreddit tier has the harshest winner-take-all shape in the data. The typical post there earns a median 154 points while winners take 2,069.5, a 13.4x gap. That is consistent with how Reddit's ranking algorithm compounds early visibility: in big, fast feeds, posts that clear the early threshold keep collecting votes while everything else stalls.
Do winning posts get more comments per upvote?
Winners in small subreddits are conversation-dense, winners in mega subreddits are not. Dividing median comments by median score for winners in each tier: small-sub winners run 0.69 comments per point, mid 0.27, large 0.17, and mega 0.03. The smaller the community, the more a winning post looks like a discussion rather than a broadcast.
A 20x gradient: small-subreddit wins are conversations (0.69 comments per point), mega-subreddit wins are spectacles (0.03).
That is a 20x difference in conversation density between the ends of the scale, computed from the medians in the table above. In a small subreddit, the median winner has 59 comments against an 86-point score, nearly one comment for every upvote. In a mega subreddit, the median winner has 1,526 comments against 55,310 points, upvotes vastly outrunning discussion.
The takeaway for anyone posting deliberately: in small and mid communities, the win condition is starting a thread people want to talk in, which is why question framing, specific scenarios, and opinions with room to disagree do the heavy lifting there. Winners also out-comment the rest in every tier (3.1x to 4.2x the median), so comment activity travels with winning everywhere, it just dominates the definition of winning at the small end. We cover how to build that discussion layer in our Reddit engagement guide.
Do title length, flair, and posting day actually matter?
Mostly less than the advice industry claims. In our data, winners' median titles run 4 to 8 characters longer than the rest in three tiers but 4 characters shorter in mega subreddits, flair share is nearly identical between winners and the rest in three of four tiers, and weekday overlaps are heavy.
The details, honestly framed:
- Title length: median winner titles are 64 vs 60 characters in small subreddits, 56 vs 48 in mid, 62 vs 54 in large, and 76 vs 80 in mega. A mild lean toward slightly longer, more specific titles in the three smaller tiers, reversed in mega. These are modest gaps in medians, not a formula. If you want to see what titles actually top your target community, pull them with our free subreddit title scraper instead of applying a universal rule.
- Flair: winners vs the rest ran 47.3% vs 47.8% in small, 61.3% vs 61.6% in large, and 40.5% vs 41.1% in mega. Effectively zero difference. Only mid subreddits showed a gap, 86.6% vs 81.4%, in the tier where flair is closest to mandatory anyway. Use flair where the rules require it, but our data gives no support for flair as an upvote lever.
- Weekday: the top three posting days for winners and the rest overlap in every tier, with only the ordering shuffled. Large-sub winners and the rest even share the same top day, Saturday. Mega winners lean Thursday, Tuesday, Monday while the rest lean Friday, Wednesday, Tuesday. We would not build a calendar on differences this thin.
We are publishing these nulls on purpose. A study that only reports exciting differences is a study you should not trust.
When do winning posts actually go up?
Winners' posting hours mostly overlap with everyone else's, with one interesting exception in the biggest tiers. In mid and small subreddits, winners and the rest share nearly identical top hours around 13:00 to 17:00 UTC. In large subreddits the single most common hour among winners is 22:00 UTC, and in mega subreddits it is 12:00 UTC, both outside the rest's 13:00 to 18:00 UTC cluster.
The full top-five hours for winners: small 13, 14, 16, 15, 19 UTC; mid 16, 15, 14, 17, 21 UTC; large 22, 15, 14, 17, 20 UTC; mega 12, 21, 19, 15, 14 UTC. One reading is that in huge, crowded feeds, posts launched slightly off the main rush face less competition for early attention. But we want to be straight with you: this is a correlation in observational data and the off-peak hours are one entry among five that otherwise overlap with the crowd. Treat it as a hypothesis to test, not a rule.
Timing is also community-specific in a way a 50-subreddit aggregate cannot capture. Before scheduling anything, check the actual activity curve of your target community with our free best time to post tool, and see our data-backed timing guide for how to combine audience, competition, and moderation clocks.
What should you actually do with this data?
Pick your tier first, then match the format, benchmark, and win condition to it. Everything else in Reddit strategy sits downstream of community size.
A compact playbook by tier:
| If you post in | Lead format | Realistic top-10% score | Win condition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small (tens of K to low M) | Text, always | ~86 points | Start a conversation, 0.69 comments per point |
| Mid (hundreds of K to ~4.5M) | Text base, images and links overperform | ~710 points | Discussion plus a visual or source edge |
| Large (~3M to ~22M) | Text base, images 2.4x overrepresented | ~2,070 points | Clear the brutal 13.4x winner gap early |
| Mega (~17M to ~67M) | Link or image, never bare text | ~55,310 points | Instant broadcast appeal at scroll speed |
Then respect what the winner multiples imply. In every tier, winning posts pull away from the pack rather than edging past it, and the gap is widest exactly where feeds move fastest. That makes the first hour disproportionately important: a post that stalls at the tier median almost never migrates into the winner column later. Our guide on how to get upvotes on Reddit covers the organic side of that first hour. If your content is genuinely strong but keeps dying in the early-visibility lottery, seeding that window is exactly what our Reddit upvote service exists for, delivered gradually so the post's momentum looks like what the winners in this study look like.
And skip the levers our data does not support. Flair optimization, day-of-week hacking, and universal title-length rules all showed marginal or zero separation between winners and everyone else.
What can't this study tell you?
It cannot prove causation, see removed posts, or speak for subreddits outside the sample. Our crawl covers 50 communities from Reddit's public listings, skews toward already-visible posts by design, and reads Reddit's fuzzed display scores. Within-community culture, title wording, and content quality are outside what this dataset measures.
We also did not measure upvote ratios, author account age, or crossposting, and the 385 posts from new listings are too few to profile fresh posts properly. Where the data was thin, such as the 16 image winners in small subreddits, we have said so rather than dressed it up. If you want to sanity-check any community before applying these patterns, our free subreddit stats checker shows its posting rules and activity profile in one place.
FAQ
What type of post gets the most upvotes on Reddit?
It depends on subreddit size. In our 34,095-post study, text made up 95.2% of top-10% posts in small subreddits and just 0.2% in mega subreddits, where links (48.4%) and images (37.8%) dominate winners. Match the format to the community tier, not to a universal rule.
How many upvotes is a good Reddit post?
Calibrate to community size. In our data, a top-10% post has a median score of 86 in small subreddits, 710 in mid-size, about 2,070 in large, and 55,310 in mega subreddits. The typical post in those same tiers medians 10, 119, 154, and about 13,253 points respectively.
Does post flair help you get more upvotes?
Our data says no. Flair share was nearly identical between winning posts and everyone else in three of four size tiers, for example 61.3% versus 61.6% in large subreddits. Use flair where a community requires it, but do not expect it to move your score.
What is the best day of the week to post on Reddit?
Our study found only marginal weekday differences. Winners' and typical posts' top days overlapped in every tier, with Saturday shared as the top day in large subreddits. Day of week matters far less than community choice, format fit, and first-hour momentum, so test your specific subreddit instead.
Do longer titles get more upvotes on Reddit?
Slightly, in most tiers, in our data. Median winner titles ran 4 to 8 characters longer than typical posts in small, mid, and large subreddits, but 4 characters shorter in mega subreddits. The gaps are modest, so treat specific, informative titles as the goal rather than a character count.
Why do text posts fail in huge subreddits?
In our data, text posts were 2.2% of typical posts in mega subreddits but only 0.2% of winners. Communities with tens of millions of subscribers behave like broadcast feeds where content is judged at scroll speed, which favors instantly legible images and links over posts that require opening and reading.
Where does the data in this study come from?
From our own crawl of Reddit's public listings: 34,095 posts across 50 subreddits, collected in July 2026, spanning posts from July 2023 to July 2026 via top-of-year, top-of-month, hot, and new listings. We compared each size tier's top 10% of posts by score against the rest, using medians.
Cite this study: UpvoteGG, "What Gets Upvoted on Reddit? We Analyzed 34,095 Posts Across 50 Subreddits," data collected July 2026. Canonical URL: https://upvotegg.com/blog/what-gets-upvoted-on-reddit — free to reference with a link back.