Data study
What 263,750 Reddit comments reveal about what people actually buy
Most "best of" lists are guesses. We did the boring version instead: scanned 337,952 Reddit posts, collected 263,750 comments from 54 communities, and extracted 45,873 product mentions from them. Here is what those mentions actually say. Every number on this page is a raw count from that corpus, not an estimate. Journalists and writers are welcome to cite it.
Data last refreshed August 2, 2026. Updated as the corpus grows.
Finding 1
Reddit recommends far more than it warns
Of 44,254 mentions that take a side, 41,055 were endorsements and 3,199 were warnings or outright negative. That is 93% positive, or about 12.8 endorsements for every one against. A further 1,619 mentions were mixed and are excluded here, since they argue both ways. The internet's reputation for negativity does not hold up when people talk about gear they own: they mostly tell each other what to buy, not what to avoid.
93% endorsements 7% warnings
Finding 2
The leaderboard is chores and tool brands
Two things dominate. First, appliances that take a recurring chore away entirely: a robot vacuum, an air fryer, a bidet attachment, a rice cooker. Second, cordless tool brands, which people argue about by brand rather than by product, so Milwaukee, DeWalt and Ryobi accumulate mentions across every thread about which system to buy into. The single most-mentioned entry is an e-reader. Nothing here is new or expensive-for-its-own-sake.
Ranked by raw mention count across the whole corpus. Retailers and bare company names (“I got it on Amazon”) are excluded because they are not products; nothing is filtered by whether we can link to it.
Finding 3
Kitchen and tools are where Reddit talks most
By mention volume, two categories pull away from the rest. Kitchen and tools each carry more owner discussion than audio, tech, or anything else. That is partly why our deepest guides start there.
Finding 4
One community dominates the conversation
r/Tools alone accounts for 8,862 product mentions, far ahead of any other community. After it, the conversation spreads across frugal, car, audio, cooking, and buy-it-for-life rooms.
Finding 5
The products that show up everywhere
A few items get recommended in communities that have nothing to do with each other. Robot vacuum tops this list, appearing across 16 distinct subreddits. When a product earns praise from people who agree on nothing else, that is the strongest signal in the data.
- Robot vacuum 16 communities · 383 mentions
- Office chair 9 communities · 37 mentions
- Air purifier 8 communities · 35 mentions
- Headlamp 8 communities · 33 mentions
- Home gym equipment 8 communities · 16 mentions
- Chef's knife 7 communities · 103 mentions
Finding 6
A bidet attachment keeps turning up where it does not belong
The bidet attachment draws 218 mentions across 6 separate communities, and it earns them in threads that had nothing to do with bathrooms: frugal living, first-apartment advice, best-purchase-under-$50 roundups. It is the clearest example of the pattern across this whole dataset: the purchases people volunteer unprompted are cheap, boring, and used every single day.
A count and a spread, not a ranking. The corpus records what people mention, not what things cost, so we cannot and do not claim it beats every other inexpensive product.
How to cite this
Use the data freely
- Source: Upvote Picks, "What 263,750 Reddit comments reveal about what people actually buy." https://upvotepicks.com/research/reddit-buying-data/
- Method: product mentions extracted from public Reddit threads via keyword and LLM passes, then filtered to items with repeated, explained owner experience. Full method on the research page.
- Want a specific cut of the data (a category, a community, a product)? It is in the database; ask and we will pull it.