This week, the AskReddit community is celebrating its 10th anniversary, so we wanted to wish them a happy cake day, give a friendly plug to their special redditor-designed t-shirt benefitting Doctors Without Borders, and share some of our favorite posts and comments from the past decade.
But first, for those who aren’t familiar with the community, r/AskReddit has been a staple of our site since its inception back in January of 2008, as recognizable to redditors now as upvotes and AMAs. With over 18 million subscribers, it’s one of the largest communities on Reddit, where users ask unique questions each day in posts that receive thousands of replies filled with surprising anecdotes, hilarious jokes, and even the occasional poem and watercolour painting.
TL;DR: It’s a Q&A with the internet.
Sometimes, the questions that reach the top of the community are deeply personal, as we saw earlier this year when one user asked, “Redditors with less than a year left to live, what is on your bucket list and how can we help you?” Other times, the questions take a creative turn, challenging redditors to think of clever responses to novel prompts like “If authors ‘covered’ novels, the way musicians cover songs, which covered novel would you be most excited to read?”
Self-help is another common theme in the community, with advice-oriented questions generating thousands of crowd-sourced life pro tips. In fact, one of the most upvoted r/AskReddit questions of all time is “What are the best free online certificates you can complete that will actually look good on a resume?”
Of course, if you visit r/AskReddit at the right moment, you might also find a humorously passive-aggressive question at the top, like the elegantly simple “Redditors who have eaten at the Times Square Olive Garden, why?” or the more meta “People who make passive-aggressive posts on /r/Askreddit that accomplish nothing, why do you do this?”
And these are just the questions. The real magic of r/AskReddit is in the comments that follow, where redditors have shared some of the most fascinating and unique stories on the internet, every day for the past ten years.
Here are a few of our favorites.
Today You, Tomorrow Me
When our co-founder Alexis Ohanian appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last year, he was asked for his favorite Reddit post of all time. In response, he shared the story of this classic comment from r/AskReddit.
10/10 With Rice
On the day after Thanksgiving back in 2014, u/DO_U_EVN_SPAGHETTI asked a question that kicked off one of the most absurd experiments in culinary history: taste-testing a range of foods with and without rice, giving each a score out of 10.
OP’s responses to the challenges in the comments—from chocolate-covered bacon with rice (6/10) to bubblegum with rice (8/10)—quickly became a meme (with its very own OutOfTheLoop thread), which redditors still reference to this day.
Lo He Leído
Some of the best r/AskReddit threads don’t end in the usual plethora of unique anecdotes, but instead encourage thousands of people to join in on a spontaneous joke. When one user posed an innocent question asking for help discovering the official name for disco balls, redditors filled the comments with unhelpful answers saying “disco ball” (don’t worry, OP eventually found out the real answer: “specular sphere”).
When another user inquired about interesting novelty bots on Reddit—like u/haikubot, the bot that turns 17-syllable comments into haikus, or u/RemindMeBot, which sends reminder messages when summoned—thousands of (human) redditors decided to pretend to be bots themselves, responding with the line, “Every account on reddit is a bot except you.”
The most famous of these threads, however, is a post from 2010, in which one redditor asked the community for technical help with a unique problem. Their Reddit account appeared to have gotten stuck with Spanish as the default language. Unfortunately, OP wasn’t able to read Spanish, but even more unfortunate was the fact that they failed to add a “[Serious]” tag to their post, which would’ve ensured straightforward answers in the comments.
And so, naturally, hundreds of redditors responded… in Spanish.
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Mejor suerte la próxima vez.
Glitch in the Matrix
Glitch in the Matrix
This question proved so intriguing that redditors have posted it multiple times over the years, sharing a fresh batch of spooky, head-scratching stories each time. It even sparked a new community, r/Glitch_In_The_Matrix, which now has almost 200,000 subscribers.
Reddit vs. Snail
Every day, redditors try their best to come up with questions that have never been asked in r/AskReddit before, but given the long history of the community, that’s a pretty tall order. Luckily, some incredibly inventive users have come to the rescue with questions that defy the odds, like this one from u/Andy316619.
You and a super intelligent snail both get 1 million dollars, and you both become immortal, however you die if the snail touches you. It always knows where you are and slowly crawls toward you. What's your plan?
byu/Andy316619 inAskReddit
As proof of this question’s timelessness, it recently scored one user in r/Tinder a free trip to Rome. Speaking of which…
Rome Sweet Rome
Another wildly unique r/AskReddit question, this post helped top commenter u/Prufrock451 score a movie deal for his epic, eight-part comment saga. (You can hear the full story here.)
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France Is Bacon
So long as we’re taking a tour of Europe, who could forget the legendary “France Is Bacon” comment from a 2010 post filled with redditors’ hilarious misunderstandings?
“Hello… Is It Greg You’re Looking For?”
All you need is Greg!
(Pro tip: Check out the top replies to this absurd question and sing ‘em aloud as you read.)
Which song is most improved when all occurrences of "I," "me," "my," etc. are replaced with "Greg"?
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Life-Changing Words
r/AskReddit has thousands of posts oriented around self-help tips, but one of the best is this simple question asking redditors for the words of wisdom that changed their lives forever.
The Ulysses Bucket List
Finally, one r/AskReddit story that captured Reddit’s heart and started a new community is u/Yoinkie2013’s response to the open-ended prompt “What is a story you’ve been dying to tell?”
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