Want to read Reddit but don’t have the time? Our daily Reddit Digest highlights the most interesting or important discussions from around the social news site—every morning.
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Does something called “wall penetrating radar” really enable the CIA to see through walls? Assuming your definition of “see” is flexible, then yes. (/r/askscience)
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Private IRC chat logs released over the weekend prove that power users ProbablyHittingOnYou and karmanaut are actually the same person. Why is this a big deal (to some people)? Both accounts moderate multiple subreddits together, suggesting an inappropriate and unfair concentration of power. More entertainingly, the accounts have had conversations with each other on multiple occasions. (/r/SubredditDrama)
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The chat logs’ release has led /r/TheoryOfReddit users to ponder Reddit’s “elite” class—the group of moderators who control about 85 percent of Reddit, according to kleinbl00. To him, the amount of control volunteer moderators have over Reddit is “colosally stupid.” Moderators can remove posts and even shut down their subreddits, as 32bites did to /r/iama last year. kleinbl00 continues: “There’s no reason whatsoever why a bare handful of squabbling 20-somethings should have a kill-switch (and nothing else) over the content read by 1.4 million people.” (/r/TheoryOfReddit)
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Redditor kukamunga has some serious Etch-a-Sketch talent. Over the weekend, he took requests from redditors. On Sunday night, he posted the completed collection—43 images altogether. He even managed to create a dotted line, which one redditor called the “Etch-a-Sketch equivalent of dividing by zero.” How did he do it? “You can use the pointer to push dust around to places previously scraped clean. To do a dotted line, you have to move slightly off the segment you just made and backtrack, pushing some dust to the beginning of the segment.” Sounds like magic to me. (/r/pics)
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Rick Santorum would not fare well in an election in the Netherlands, if Reddit’s Dutch users are any indication. (/r/Netherlands)
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Why do we forget our dreams as soon as we wake up? According to r/askscience, it’s because while we’re sleeping our brains don’t produce a hormone necessary for retention. (/r/askscience)