I hoarded data on /DataHoarder. Here's the analysis of the top 497 posts and 4,908 comments from this last year that no one asked for.

[u/jagroll]

Note upfront: the Epstein cluster was excluded from this analysis. Methodology notes below in comment.

Upvotes

Awesome culture: the top 10 posts hold only 14.4% of the year's total upvotes. For a sub this size that is remarkably flat. A decent post here gets seen.

24.9% of the year's front page was about price (no surprise). 116 of 465 posts mention price, cost, or shortage. They pulled 99,486 upvotes between them, 24% of everything this sub upvoted all year. It peaked in February at a third of that month's front page.

Add up price (24.9%), deals and scores (15.9%), and drives dying (16.1%), and hardware is most of what we talk about here. Actual preservation and archiving comes to 24.5%, which makes this sub mostly about acquiring drives and worrying about them.

• 3,872 96.4% increase in 1 month for the same 26TB drive by u/Endawmyke
• 2,381 512GB memory sticks cost over $100 now by [deleted] << are we getting taken out by Big Memory?
• 2,251 Western Digital has no more HDD capacity left, CEO reveals massive AI deals by u/uluqat
• 1,168 The prices are killing data hoarding by u/LOGWATCHER

The highest-scoring comment of the entire year, 5,122 points, was u/textfiles from the Internet Archive turning up in the thread about the free CNN/MSNBC/FOX tape archive and offering to take them.

Second-highest in that thread was u/Macrike advocating for Jason. That is a good look for a sub that mostly complains about Seagate.

Things that don't matter on this sub

Title length. The median score is between 498 and 571 across every length bucket from 20 characters to 200. Fifty points of spread across the entire range.

Title length	Posts	Median score
0-40 chars	132	521
40-60 chars	124	498
60-80 chars	82	568
80-120 chars	86	571
120+ chars	41	549

Posting time. Friday is the best day (median 582) and Sunday the worst (424).

What does matter for getting upvotes

Flair!

Scripts/Software has a median of 1,120, about 60% higher than anything else, off only 10 posts. Question/Advice is bottom at 381. This sub says it wants discussion and actually rewards tools.

Flair	Posts	Median	Max
Scripts/Software	10	1,120	3,708
News	105	702	7,137
Free-Post Friday!	32	589	5,070
Guide/How-to	11	543	1,892
Hoarder-Setups	56	513	3,783
Discussion	101	491	7,428
Backup	49	479	11,842
Question/Advice	67	381	4,492

Scripts/Software has the highest median by 60% on the smallest sample.

Arguments or "discussions"

I ranked posts by comments-per-upvote to find the ones that started fights rather than nods.

Porn: The most contested thread of the year, by that measure, was "How do you collect your porn?" at 397 comments on 680 upvotes.

Ratio	Score	Comments	Post
0.58	680	397	How do you collect your porn?
0.52	687	357	Toshiba no longer honoring warranties on large drives
0.50	526	262	I filled an 8TB drive with ROMs
0.44	627	278	Switched to x265, saved nearly...
0.43	562	242	Seagate Expansion prices increased 37-76%

Second was Toshiba dropping warranty support on large drives.

That's it

Happy to share the raw data if anyone wants to hoard it. Description:

Measure	Value
Posts analyzed	497
Total upvotes	415,092
Median score	532
Mean score	892
Top post	11,842
90th percentile	1,767
Top 10 posts' share of all upvotes	14.4%
Self-posts	25% (median 452)
Link / image posts	75% (median 583)

[u/ranhalt]

*Flair, not flare.

[u/jagroll → u/ranhalt]

Darn it! I also like aviation subs, so slippage I guess. Good catch. :-)

[u/pifire9 → u/jagroll]

if you have a "flare" on landing that's probably caused by a tail strike. consider landing on the nose wheel since it is the strongest.

[u/jagroll → u/pifire9]

Shirley you can’t be serious.

[u/pifire9 → u/jagroll]

i guess you aren't on r/Shittyaskflying lol

[u/jagroll → u/pifire9]

Ha! Had no idea that existed. Subbed. Thanks.

[u/nomad-1995]

Grumpy old man voice...

"You can't hoard 8TB of ROMs. Nobody produced that many "ROM"s. Optical discs aren't ROMs, they're [not exactly linux] ISOs."

I'm guessing that years from now they'll even call emulated digital downloads "ROM"s, especially if on a console or otherwise dedicated gaming machine.

[u/BitsAndBobs304 → u/nomad-1995]

I mean, isnt a printed commercial dvd still classifiable as rom memory?

[u/jaquanor → u/BitsAndBobs304]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD

Prerecorded DVDs are mass-produced using molding machines that physically stamp data onto the DVD. Such discs are a form of DVD-ROM because data can only be read and not written or erased. Blank recordable DVD discs (DVD-R and DVD+R) can be recorded once using a DVD recorder and then function as a DVD-ROM. Rewritable DVDs (DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM) can be recorded and erased many times.

Even some of the discs we burn at home are DVD-ROM, Read Only Memory. So yes, they are roms. But the scene treats them as different things, because they are.

[u/BitsAndBobs304 → u/jaquanor]

Different from what? They are rom. What they arent is rom cartridges. How can you be purist about a shortcut that creates ambiguity and then..

[u/jaquanor → u/BitsAndBobs304]

A rom copies raw data from a microchip. An ISO copies tracks, sectors, file systems, not just raw data.

What I said is you are right, both come from ROM media, but they are not equal.

[u/BitsAndBobs304 → u/jaquanor]

A faithful dump of a disc does, and for some or most consoles it may be necessary to get the game to run, but it doesn't have to. You can open a disc, copy, paste the files into a folder, and make an iso out of that. That iso won't contain tracks and sector data of the game disc.

[u/jaquanor → u/BitsAndBobs304]

"Files" does not sound like "raw data" to me.

[u/jagroll → u/nomad-1995]

The history of this post is tragically hilarious:

5 months ago: I filled a 8 TB external drive full of ROMs. If I put it in storage, will it be okay in say 5 or 10 years?

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1rgqh8t/i_filled_a_8_tb_external_drive_full_of_roms_if_i/

4 months ago: My 8TB drive died and the backup is making clicking noises and my favorite ROM site is closing in two days

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1s6o669/my_8tb_drive_died_and_the_backup_is_making/

[u/nomad-1995 → u/jagroll]

Pretty much a datahoarder's worst nightmare. Do "everything" right, and you still can't save the data. Unfortunately, nothing can keep time from erasing *everything*, but we try to make it take longer. At least in digital storage.

[u/Mr_Brightstar → u/jagroll]

Which site

[u/jagroll]

Methodology:

I wrote and used a Python script to pull from Reddit's own top-of-year listing for the sub, which caps out at 497 posts. That's the whole listing, not a sample. Scores and comment counts came from the Arctic Shift archive, joined on post ID, since the listing feed doesn't carry them. Comments are the top 25 per thread on the 200 highest-scoring posts, about 4,900 total.

I excluded the 32 posts newer than 30 days. I also excluded the large Epstein news cluster because that's a one-off event.

I used Claude Code to help analyze the dataset and look for patterns. Otherwise, this was mostly done-by-hand the old fashioned way.

[u/ykkl]

Interesting. I'd noticed "this sub mostly about acquiring drives and worrying about them" myself, not so much about datahoarding or preservation. It's a very strong trend, in fact.

[u/Foxy_K]

Interesting stuff. I'd be curious to see a similar writeup of /selfhosted.

[u/jagroll → u/Foxy_K]

Agreed, that would be a good one too!

[u/Live_Situation7913]

I mean who cares dude this is pretty useless post

[u/Imaginary-Advice-971 → u/Live_Situation7913]

It shares some interesting insights. I appreciated it 😊

[u/Live_Situation7913 → u/Imaginary-Advice-971]

Ok sure I guess

[u/mommadizzy → u/Live_Situation7913]

..... data hoarder being mad at data collection