reducing number of plot ticks

Alternatively, if you want to simply set the number of ticks while allowing matplotlib to position them (currently only with MaxNLocator), there is pyplot.locator_params,

pyplot.locator_params(nbins=4)

You can specify specific axis in this method as mentioned below, default is both:

# To specify the number of ticks on both or any single axes
pyplot.locator_params(axis='y', nbins=6)
pyplot.locator_params(axis='x', nbins=10)

If somebody still gets this page in search results:

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

plt.plot(...)

every_nth = 4
for n, label in enumerate(ax.xaxis.get_ticklabels()):
    if n % every_nth != 0:
        label.set_visible(False)