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Comment by FinnKuhn | Hacker News Reader

With Sankey graphs you can just "skip" one stage. So in your example you could go from "income 1" directly to "expense 1" without first going to the budget. Most people don't do this though, because most people just have all their income go to one bank account, which is the "big bucket" that all the money goes through.

You can see an example I quickly created for this here: https://sankeymatic.com/build/?i=OoQw5gpgzgBA2gFgKwAYC6MAqIA...

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This is so much better. For me the raison d'être of Sankey diagrams is to show the dependencies in money flows.

For example if I earn $500 from freelance work, but spend $200 on marketing and $400 on transport to do that, then a Sankey diagram like the one on the front page where everything gets intermingled in a main account and expenses get deducted at the end make it seem like this freelance work is a good thing and I should probably do more. In a good Sankey diagram I would immedately deduct the expenses from the freelance work, and see that instead of freelance income reaching my budget I'm actually subsidizing freelance work from my salary income.

Similarly in your example it's immediately obvious that if the wage would vanish a lot of the taxes would also vanish

That makes so much sense, thanks! I will update the example accordingly. But this shows that some knowledge is needed to make good use of Sankey diagrams. I should add some tutorial pages with examples to make it easier to get started

That's a better visualization than most people present.

An example of one that disappoints is https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/15f01pb/oc... where that one big bucket of 'total applications' loses a lot of data. Was everything from Dice ghosted? That would be useful information. I would contend that there's no value in the 'total applications' bucket in there at all other than to sum up the leftmost column - which can be done separately.

One big bucket isn't necessarily wrong, but if one is trying to show off the features of the Sankey diagram, showing it with the stronger representations that it is capable of doing can be useful.

Having seen countless poorly done ones with an everything bucket in the middle that squashes valuable relationships between the inputs and outputs... and that's a turn off for me when they are presented that way.

Is there a name for a specialized Sankey graph that also retains color across the combination stage?

It'd start to be a layout algorithm at that point, but example input arm 1 being orange (everything else blue) and the orange then subdividing into its ultimate destinations. Eg. 20% of this output, 15% of this one...

You can certainly do that, although it is a bit cumbersome. See this example I created: https://sankeymatic.com/build/?i=OoQw5gpgzgBA2gFgKwAYC6MAqIA...

If you could do something like this automatically that would be really cool, although probably not and only useful in a few very specific circumstances.

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