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Crowdsource your brain!

Can't remember something? Get help on Reddit.

 

Kevin Morris

Internet Culture

Posted on Jul 22, 2011   Updated on Jun 3, 2021, 3:51 am CDT

Have you ever had something on the tip of your tongue that’s just driving you mad?

You know, like that Mozart symphony that goes “da-nana da-nana da-nana DA, da-nana da-nana da-nana DA, da-nana da-nana da-nana DA,

Or the name of that movie — you know, the one about a psychiatrist who almost goes insane because he’s treating a man who seems to know everything?

Or that really useful social news site on the Internet that always has the answer to your question?

Well, it turns out, there’s a subreddit for that.

The section of social news site Reddit is called r/tipofmytongue.

Its claim to fame? The combined brainpower of more than 16,000 redditors who can crowdsource your detective work for those agonizing memory lapses.

The subreddit is yet another example of the extraordinary creativity redditors bring to what is ostensibly a link-sharing discussion site. They already have entire communities devoted to videos of bugs locked in mortal combat, fort building, and donating pizzas to strangers.

Just a year old, r/tipofmytongue has already spawned a few spinoffs, including r/whatsthisthing, for figuring out the identity of mysterious objects, and r/ineedaname, for polling the hivemind on names for anything, from your band to your cell phone to your dog..

But like the rest of the site, r/tipofmytongue also seems to be suffering from an influx of poorly behaved new users.

One of the year’s top posts isn’t a query at all, in fact. It’s a complaint.

“Does it not aggravate anyone else when you post the answer to someones submission and they don’t bother to take the two seconds to give you an upvote?” wrote monkeymynd in a post that received 209 upvotes.

Still, that occasional rudeness hasn’t stopped slowed down the r/tipofmytongue sleuths.

Take the two examples from the top.

Redditors figured out that the Mozart piece is Symphony No. 40. And the movie? Stay, a 2005 thriller starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts.

You may not have remembered it (or even heard of it).

But Reddit’s hivemind did.

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*First Published: Jul 22, 2011, 4:39 pm CDT