With 30 million unique visitors and close to 2 billion page views a month, it’s safe to say a lot happens on the link-sharing and discussion site Reddit every day. There are more than 90,000 sections on the site; a single discussion alone can sometimes attract more than 10,000 comments.
How can anyone keep track of it all? Our daily Reddit digest highlights the most interesting or important discussions from around the site—every morning.
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Last year redditor braintumorsscuks shared the heart-breaking story of his wife’s death from a brain tumor. This year he’s returned to Reddit with a sculpture he made of her. He posted the full album to Imgur with commentary. “I’ve worked as a professional portrait painter for years,” he wrote. “Normally, the process with portraiture is that the closer you get to a likeness the happier you feel about the work. When sculpting your wife a month after her death, the dynamic is very different.” (/r/somethingimade)
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Out of nowhere, /r/LearnJapanese reader atgm starts slinging Christmas presents: $20 subscriptions to a popular Web learning tool. The redditor says it’s “sort of like a scholarship.” (/r/LearnJapanese)
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After front page attention, /r/SOPA has grown rapidly and become overrun with memes and image macros. Is it a perfect example to show why popularity is the death-knell for serious subreddits? (/r/SOPA)
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Redditors discuss the morality of image meme Good Guy Greg: “Is it reasonable and possible to place this humble meme in a larger context?” asks zidiot, sparking a really interesting discussion. What does Good Guy Greg teach us about our redditors’ values? (/r/philosophy)
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A high school student created an alternate reality game, which he ran through a few small subreddits. (/r/TheoryOfReddit)
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“What’s something you found so pretentious that it actually rendered you speechless?” This /r/AskReddit thread could have been really interesting, but apparently redditors don’t understand the word “pretentious.” “Reddit thinks pretentious means shit rich people say,” moiviskarlsson observes. (/r/AskReddit)
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On Twitter a BBC reporter reveals a shocking torture practice employed by Muammar Gaddafi. Within hours, a redditor took to /r/askscience to learn how the practice would actually affect someone. “This is a terrible question, but what happens if the penis is superglued so urine can’t exit?” The answers are necessarily disturbing, but they also show (/r/askscience)’s value–not just for general daily edification, but for adding context and understanding to the news. (/r/askscience)
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/r/TrueReddit discusses the death of Christopher Hitchens. (/r/TrueReddit)
