Looking for “porn” online

The Internet is for porn. But Reddit, the social news site?

It’s for “porn.”

That’s the community’s wry, mocking label for anything worth staring at. Enterprising redditors have reclaimed the word for their own purposes. It’s now a suffix, meaning big, gorgeous, and completely safe-for-work pictures of whatever precedes it. There’s earthporn, foodporn, waterporn, spaceporn and, yes, even animalporn and humanporn.

None of them will get you in trouble at the office or home, despite the “porn” labels—or perhaps they will, but only because of that label. (There is real porn on Reddit, and yes, it’s a problem.)

Reddit’s nonpornographic “porn” collections surfaced when Reddit user IgnatiousReilly queried the TrueReddit forum on the site’s best sections, or subreddits. TrueReddit serves as a gathering place for Reddit’s true believers, who believe the site’s homepage no longer displays the best material on the site. The replies to IgnatiousReilly served as a kind of road map for finding little-known bastions of high-quality content on the site.

Call it Redditporn.

More ways to find indecently stimulating stuff—for your mind, that is—on Reddit?

Look for more obscure subsections. Don’t read r/Economics, for instance, because “if you are serious and well-educated, it’s pretty pedestrian,” wrote one redditor. The poster suggested the far more expert discussions at r/Macroeconomics, r/HardEcon, and r/BehaviorialEconomics.

And nearly everyone in the thread agreed: avoid r/Politics at all costs — where, they said, posters’ political passions often get in the way of rational debate. For your political fix, the TrueRedditors recommended r/Moderatepolitics, r/StateoftheUnion, and r/Greed.

In the thread’s most popular comment, subtextual had a redditor pro tip: instead of following certain forums, follow other redditors who consistently post great content. He personally recommended marquis_of_chaos, blackstar9000, anutensil, and jason-samfield.

So that would be … redditorporn?

Subtextual also suggested subreddits like r/Freethought, r/ReligionInAmerica, and r/Longtext, among others.

“P.S.,” subtextual wrote at the end of the comment. “Don’t tell anyone else about any of these subreddits, kthx.”

Oops.