Everything Comes From Reddit

Everything viral on the internet basically comes from Reddit. I don’t mean it’s inspired by Reddit or references Reddit—I mean that’s where it starts. The cat videos, the fast-food kitchen photos, the celebrity interviews that news outlets pretend they discovered—it’s all funneled through that site first. BuzzFeed wouldn’t have anything to write about without Reddit. Mainstream news outlets constantly mine it. We all do it.

Reddit is the internet’s real content factory. Everywhere else is just repackaging.

A guy named James Trimble made an interactive map showing the 200 most successful Reddit posts of all time. The premise is obvious: study what works, learn the formula, crack the code. But it doesn’t quite work that way. The thing that actually breaks through is never the thing you’re trying to make break through.

The most upvoted post on Reddit ever was titled Test post - please ignore! Some user was just testing if their account worked, asked people explicitly not to engage with it, and it became the most successful thing on the platform. That’s everything about the internet distilled into a single post.

The moment you’re performing is the moment it stops working. The thing that wins is always the one that doesn’t care if anyone’s watching.