Original research
The r/Peptides census
We pulled one trailing year of r/Peptides and r/compoundedtirzepatide, 28,313 posts and 273,921 comments, and counted what the community actually talks about. Retatrutide leads at 15.5% of posts. One post in nine is dose arithmetic. Vendor vetting runs on reputation, not lab evidence. And the pharmacy-compounded sub grew 5.6x while the gray-market sub cooled. Every table below is reproducible from public data.
Data window: 27 August 2025 to 27 August 2026, via the Arctic Shift archive. Counts computed 29 August 2026.
Finding 1
Which compounds does the community actually discuss?
Retatrutide, by a wide margin: 2,613 of 16,878 r/Peptides posts name it, 15.5% and the top of the table. The striking part is the other end. Semaglutide, the most prescribed GLP-1 drug in the world, appears in 1.0% of posts. The sub is not a mirror of the peptide market; it is the help desk for the part of it that has no pharmacist.
| Compound | Posts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Retatrutide | 2,613 | 15.5% |
| GHK-Cu | 1,853 | 11.0% |
| BPC-157 | 1,515 | 9.0% |
| Ipamorelin | 1,371 | 8.1% |
| CJC-1295 | 1,314 | 7.8% |
| GLOW/KLOW blends | 845 | 5.0% |
| TB-500 | 843 | 5.0% |
| Tirzepatide | 638 | 3.8% |
| MOTS-c | 499 | 3.0% |
| Semaglutide | 167 | 1.0% |
Document frequency: a post naming three compounds counts once for each. Spelling variants and common abbreviations are folded in. The ranking explains this site's coverage order; the retatrutide calculator and dosage guide exist because this table says they should.
Finding 2
What does the community not understand?
The arithmetic. 1,886 r/Peptides posts, 11.2% or one in nine, land in a dose-maths confusion family: reconstitution, syringe units, or unit conversion. And the two subs are confused about opposite things. r/Peptides asks how to mix powder; the pharmacy sub asks how to read a syringe, because its vials arrive pre-mixed and the mixing problem never happens.
| Family | r/Peptides | r/compoundedtirzepatide |
|---|---|---|
| Reconstitution and BAC water | 7.6% | 0.6% |
| Units and syringes | 2.2% | 4.7% |
| Dose conversion and calculation | 3.4% | 3.4% |
| "Did I ruin it" | 0.6% | 0.8% |
| Storage | 2.5% | 2.3% |
| Any of the first four | 11.2% | 8.3% |
Families overlap, so rows exceed the union. The inversion in the first two rows is the cleanest structural finding in the corpus: gray-market users struggle with mixing, pharmacy users with measuring. A calculator that only does reconstitution serves half the confusion.
Finding 3
Which way is the market moving?
growth in r/compoundedtirzepatide comment volume across the year: 8,828 comments in the first 73-day window, 49,336 in the last.
The two subs moved in opposite directions. The pharmacy-compounded sub compounded all year and overtook the general sub in the spring. r/Peptides itself peaked in midwinter at 32,180 comments per window and then fell about 40% by late summer. The audience arriving in this niche is increasingly someone holding a pre-mixed pharmacy vial and an insulin syringe, not a bag of raw powder.
That matches what the keyword data shows from the search side, where dosing and calculator queries grew 4 to 13x year over year. The demand is real, recent, and still forming its habits.
| Window | r/Peptides | r/compoundedtirzepatide |
|---|---|---|
| Aug to Nov 2025 | 20,767 | 8,828 |
| Nov 2025 to Jan 2026 | 26,681 | 15,999 |
| Jan to Apr 2026 | 32,180 | 30,125 |
| Apr to Jun 2026 | 24,821 | 45,792 |
| Jun to Aug 2026 | 19,392 | 49,336 |
Finding 4
How does the community vet vendors?
r/Peptides posts using legit-or-scam vetting language against posts naming Janoshik, the lab whose reports the whole market's trust runs through.
By asking strangers. 492 posts, 2.9% of the year, use legit-or-scam language about a seller. Far fewer reach for evidence: 112 posts mention a COA or test report, 108 mention purity, 76 name Janoshik, 62 say third-party tested. Reputation questions outnumber every category of lab evidence by roughly four to one.
The infrastructure for evidence exists. The lab runs a free verification form, keeps a public archive, and sellers attach reports to listings. The reflex just has not caught up with the tooling, which is the gap this site exists in: a report you have not verified is a screenshot, and a thread of strangers saying "legit" is weaker than either.
The receipts
Three threads that carry the whole story.
Aggregate counts flatten things. These threads, cited by id, are what the numbers look like up close.
The year's loudest dose-maths thread (score 281, 113 replies) is titled "PLEASE STOP USING UNITS TO MEASURE YOUR DOSE". Its argument is the arithmetic this site's calculators print: units describe volume, so two identical 30 mg vials give different doses per unit once different amounts of water go in. Dose lives in milligrams; the syringe reading is derived. Thread 1thoyou.
A user on an 80 mg four-compound KLOW blend in 3 mL could not say how much GHK-Cu a 20-unit draw carried. The top correction worked it out: 3.3 mg, plus roughly 667 mcg of each other component, in every draw, at a ratio the vial fixed. The arithmetic is on our blend page; the thread is 1sm1t98.
Two community-built calculators launched inside the year to warm receptions: a comparison database (score 176) and a solve-backwards calculator whose pitch was that existing tools ask the wrong question (score 86). Threads 1qknmko and 1quss9h. The confusion census above is the demand those builders saw.
Cite anything on this page with a link to it. The dataset is public Reddit data via the Arctic Shift archive; the counts are document-frequency regex matches over titles, bodies and comments, and the method section below is enough to reproduce every table.
Method and limits
How the counting worked.
One trailing year, 27 August 2025 to 27 August 2026, of r/Peptides (16,878 posts, 123,841 comments) and r/compoundedtirzepatide (11,435 posts, 150,080 comments), pulled from the Arctic Shift archive of public Reddit data. Compound counts are regex document frequency over post title plus body, with spelling variants folded in. Confusion families use the same patterns with a negation window, so "no bac water needed" does not count as a reconstitution question.
The limits are the usual ones. Counts are documents, not people. Subreddits are self-selected, so these numbers describe the communities, not the market; deleted posts are counted where the archive holds them and lost where it does not. Comment-volume windows follow the archive's 73-day scrape chunks. No language model classified anything: every number is a pattern match you can rerun.
Sources
Arctic Shift archive // r/Peptides // r/compoundedtirzepatide // MechPeptides archive mirror
Published 29 August 2026. Quoted thread titles and figures belong to their authors; threads are cited by id. Educational content; research compounds are not for human consumption.
What this study is
MechPeptides sells nothing. This page counts public forum discussion of research compounds; it does not evaluate any compound, endorse any practice the counts describe, or offer medical advice.
Popularity is not evidence. The table-topping compound in finding 1 has no approved product anywhere, and the doses the community names most often have never been tested in a human dose-finding study.