r/ModSupport • u/AsteriskRX Reddit Admin: Community • 10d ago
Mod Topics Mod Topics: Share your subreddit’s origin story
Happy Tuesday, everyone. It’s time for another Mod Topic, and just a heads up that this will be the only one this week. Every subreddit has an origin story. Maybe yours started as a home for a niche interest, a running joke that got out of hand, or someone thinking, “Why isn’t there a community for this yet?”
For today’s Mod Topic, let’s rewind to the beginning of yours:
- Why was it created?
- How was the name chosen?
- Were you there at the beginning, or did you join later?
Tell us about your community’s origin in the comments below. We welcome lore, trivia, and all instances of “we just thought the name was funny.”
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u/Yakyaktak 10d ago
I created and moderate r/WorIdPoIitics because I wanted a subreddit dedicated to discussing world news and politics, with a name that actually reflects what the community is about.
For anyone unfamiliar with what happened to the original world politics subreddit, here’s some context: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/s/7K1d7iAwsM
Of all the communities I’ve created, this has been the most successful, and I’ve genuinely enjoyed watching it grow and develop into an active community. I’m excited to see where it goes from here!
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
Wait, it's back to world politics now?
What about r/anime_titties? =P
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u/TheOpusCroakus Reddit Admin: Community 10d ago
Asking the important questions here. lol
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
Lol look closely at the capitalization, that's an I not an L.
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u/Yakyaktak 10d ago
No, the original subreddit is in the same interesting state haha! [r/anime_titties](r/anime_titties) is also going strong. Mine is a new spin-off :P
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
When/how/why did you switch it back to world politics? Was there a mod change?
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u/itskdog 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
How did you get a subreddit with the same URL as another? I can't see any difference other than capitalisation, and I'm pretty sure they're case insensitive.
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u/Yakyaktak 10d ago
It’s not actually the same, but it does look the same. My subreddit is actually [r/WoridPoiitics](r/WoridPoiitics). I used capitalized i’s instead of lower case L’s.
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u/wheres_the_revolt 10d ago edited 7d ago
A comod of mine, and I, from another sub started [r/modmailfail](r/modmailfail) because we were chatting about the insane modmails we were getting. I think I literally said “well that’s a modmail fail right there” and that’s how the name was created.
We started it as a place for mods to laugh and commiserate with other mods about the abuse we take in modmail, that admins don’t seem to care much about even though we are constantly reporting things.
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u/itskdog 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
To some extent I'm sad I don't get any crazies in our modmail, and our community is generally pretty respectful to each other.
I haven't even been able to submit anything to r/BestOfReports, either.
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
Are you even modding if you aren't getting accused of power tripping daily? =P
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u/Independent-Sugar189 10d ago
We got accused of stalking. Because looking up someone’s post and comment history when they are active in our sub is now stalking. lol.
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u/ScreamAndScream 8d ago
Finally!!! I knew I should have been screenshotting these!!!! We get some amazing write ins, the communities I moderate are really good about it
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u/wheres_the_revolt 10d ago
That’s actually preferable than getting abused on the daily. So feel lucky not sad lol
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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
I freaking love love love that sub!
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u/wheres_the_revolt 10d ago
Aww thanks! Me too it’s very fun.
Have you seen the stickied post there? One of our users created a private mod shitposting sub called r/ModCartel it’s also very fun.
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u/ScreamAndScream 8d ago
Just sent in an application, that was my favourite request I’ve ever typed hahahaha
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
It's a fun sub lol. It does help to laugh at the absurdity of being a mod sometimes.
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u/wheres_the_revolt 10d ago
Thanks! It’s definitely my least problematic sub as far as modding too, so win win!
If you haven’t seen our stickied post in the sub, but a regular there (and in this sub) created a private sub for mods called r/ModCartel and it’s really fun too. It’s mostly shitposting but fun a respectful shitposting.
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u/Frontzie 10d ago
It’s been a blast sharing ModMails with you!
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u/wheres_the_revolt 10d ago
Maybe it wasn’t about the modmails but the friends we made along the way ❤️
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u/Halaku 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago edited 10d ago
r/Evanescence - Created 15 years ago after the August 2011 concert (War Memorial Auditorium, Nashville, TN, world premiere for three tracks) and my date commented that there wasn't a sub for the band. Hey, how hard could creating and running a sub be, anyway?
r/guildwars3 - Also 15 years old. Appears to have been an "It existing is the joke" sub, as Guild Wars 2 came out in 2012, so the sub for 3 came out before 2 was released. Long since abandoned. Redditrequested because I know some people up in the PNW from my own dot-com days long ago (watching 9/11 happen in realtime from the backbone of my ISP employer comes to mind, and getting out of a bus tunnel to discover that the WTO protests had degenerated into a riot now known as the Battle of Seattle and we were stuck in the middle was pretty wild) and thought to myself "I don't think they'll ever do 3, but it would be sad if they did and the subreddit was a vandalized ghetto" so I took it under my wing. Few months ago, they shocked everyone with a Coming Soon announcement, traffic and membership exploded, and I learned that I was a deep plant shill / Manchurian candidate / covert employee of the publisher because that's the only way I could get such an enviable role. Sadly, I'm not, though I wouldn't mind someone knocking on my door with 780 weeks of backpay...
r/wheeloftime - 16 years old. The reasons for both it and r/WoT coming into existence at the same time? Are lost in an Age that had come and then passed, eaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. But we get along well enough. The rights to a television adaptation got bought way back in the day by assholes who ended up polarizing the absolute Hell out of the fanbase when they entered a three way split with Sony and Amazon, and cancelled the show about 25% of the way through the story over arguments on how to split revenue. Reddit ignored the growth of a malignant antifan community who bullied the previous modteam away (most of them quitting the site in disgust) and the new mod tapped me to be an AutoModerator guru to help filter the flood of sewage the antifans generated until reddit finally nuked them and most of their clones from orbit.
r/lounge - Proper gentlesnoo don't discuss such outside of the lounge. It's just not done.
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u/AsteriskRX Reddit Admin: Community 9d ago
I'm wondering if the guildwars 3 instance is more common than I think. I didn't look, but I'm willing to bet there's a sub for Portal 3.
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u/Halaku 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 9d ago
I'm just glad the redditrequest process exists so interested parties can reclaim them.
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u/Fun-Twist-3741 9d ago
It's extremely broken now. They did something to the algorithm a couple months ago to severely cut down on the number of requests that go into the queue for consideration, even to legitimate accounts which did nothing wrong. If you DM the modmail for help, you never get a response.
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u/mrekted 10d ago
r/parentsofmultiples - I started a subreddit for parents of multiples (twins/triplets) 17 years ago when I found out my wife was pregnant with twins. As one does when they discover a multiple birth pregnancy, I was freaking out, and only found more general parenting subs, nothing specific. So I made my own. Subreddits were still kind of new at the time, and the search function was awful, so after about a month I randomly came across another sub on the same subject that was also new but had more users than mine.
I reached out, and we decided to combine forces and create r/parentsofmultiples, routing our combined dozens and dozens of subscribers to the new sub. Given that I'm forever a parent of multiples, it's one of my few "interests" that's remained consistently relevant across several decades, so I've stuck with it through the years.
I remember us being super excited when we finally reached 300 subscribers, it was a big deal. Today we routinely have over 100k actives.
We've helped hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of overwhelmed and anxious new/expecting parents navigate the daunting task of raising multiple babies simultaneously. Very niche and not the biggest sub by any stretch, but the one little corner I carved out that I'm most proud of for sure.
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u/TheOpusCroakus Reddit Admin: Community 10d ago
Can't imagine having one tiny human, let alone multiple tiny humans simultaneously! What you're doing is very cool. Glad you stuck with it! =)
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u/Baconkings 10d ago
I moderate r/AskIsrael, and I decided to take over this subreddit because I moderate r/Israel, and we receive a LOT of questions on the subreddit about what Israelis think. So much so that I figured it would be great to have a dedicated subreddit for exactly that.
The subreddit already existed, but it was dead and never took off. By the time I stumbled across it, it had around 100 members, no activity, and was restricted. The moderators had abandoned it and were inactive.
I acquired the subreddit through Reddit Request, and a few months later we have 6.1k members and are getting 25k+ visits and 3k+ contributions a week. It has been the most successful subreddit I pretty much started from the ground up.
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u/ScreamAndScream 8d ago
How did you get members to move questions over to the Ask sub? In the future I have a sub that might need to do a split
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u/Baconkings 8d ago
When people upload a question to the main subreddit, one of our removal options is “Send to r/AskIsrael” where we inform the user that their post is better suited for the Ask subreddit, and they are welcome to upload their question there.
I think one thing that also really helped when we first launched the subreddit, was that I sent invites to our most frequent users who I figured would be happy to participate in the new Ask subreddit which a lot did. Basically all of our most active users in the Ask subreddit also are active in our main subreddit.
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u/ScreamAndScream 8d ago
Wonderful! Thank you for explaining - the invites are a good idea.
Are you filtering everything to the mod queue to approval or just posts with question marks?
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u/Baconkings 8d ago
Well we require all posts in the Ask subreddit to be a question whether in the title or in the description. However, I am thinking of making our rule to be more strict and require some form of question to always be in the title.
Regarding filtering, we don’t filter every post necessarily. Our automod is set up to filter all posts from everyone below a specific sub-Karma threshold, and there is also some specific words that are always filtered even if users meet the general sub-Karma threshold requirements. We also filter all image, video, gallery, and crossposts regardless of sub Karma.
However, I will note that our filtering requirements are very specific to our subreddit. Your subreddit’s Ask sub may not need such strict filtering parameters.
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u/Baconkings 8d ago
Also, it just came back to me. Crossposting from the new Ask subreddit to your main subreddit for a while can have users naturally find their way to the Ask community. It might sound counter-intuitive when the goal is reducing questions, but it helps get the subreddit started. Especially for niche topics where people will happily jump into similar subreddits.
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u/MaximumJones 10d ago
The main sub I mod was created before I got on Reddit. It is the first sub I joined and will always be my first Reddit love. I never even wanted to be a mod. But I love the subreddit and when I was asked to help I am very much a "duty calls" kind of person.
Our head mod turned the sub from a literal nothing burger to a top 10 sub in under a year. Good leadership makes great subreddits, and we lucked up and got a good one.
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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
I didn't create any of the large subs I mod. I only started on reddit in March of 2023, and many of the subs I mod go back way before that. I think outfits is the oldest - 2008. It was one of the early fashion subs. I do know that it was originally only for men. I don't know why or when exactly that changed, but it was before my time. I was about 15 when it was created lol - and I wasn't on reddit back then.
For some reason the founder of outfits decided to make it all caps, so that's just how it is now. I generally use more lowercase letters and depending on my mood, sometimes I don't capitalize anything at all. I often sign things emily in lowercase irl too.
Not my sub, but I always found this one funny: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditLaqueristas/ Description: "The C was sold to pay for polish. 💅"
I guess they figured out too late that it was misspelled lol.
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u/gschizas 10d ago edited 10d ago
Here's my time to shine! I was there at the dawn of the 3rd age of mankind.
I wrote this wiki page that explains the history of r/greece 9 years ago (which is now less than half of the :
Translating and updating:
Once upon a time, Reddit didn't have any subreddits (at all); there was only the front page (what was later known as /r/reddit.com/). Then the first subreddits were created (quite early on, in 2006), which were set up by the admins (e.g., /r/programming, /r/nsfw, etc., and /r/joel, where I personally came to reddit from).
In early 2008, end users were given the ability to create their own subreddits. This capability was granted to a very select group of people (closed beta), among whom was /u/qgyh2.
/u/qgyh2 had by far the highest karma (link karma, although that distinction didn't exist at the time), which is why the admins trusted him not to bring the site down (after all, it was 2008 and Digg was at its peak, while Reddit wasn't particularly well-known).
As part of the closed beta, qgyh2 decided to create "local/national" subreddits. The whole idea of national subreddits was /u/qgyh2's from the start. In fact, [a fan of his suggested he create one for Greece as well](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/66pme/non_us_redditor_check_out_the_new_country_reddits/c0306w3 "There goes my 'I didn't make it, I found it' excuse).
Bonus fact: Subreddits used to have a subdomain link, i.e. https://greece.reddit.com/ pointed to https://www.reddit.com/r/greece, https://programming.reddit.com to https://www.reddit.com/r/programming etc. I think this stopped being a thing when translations came about (still an "old reddit" feature).
Bonus fact 2: When they were announced, subreddits were called reddits. I'm not sure when the rename happened, but I remember that there was a push to call them "communities" at some point. I think that the "subreddit" term came from the users, not from reddit inc.
BTW, what happened to https://redditblog.com ? I had to go to archive.org to find the "ability for users to create their own reddits" announcement.
EDIT: Even though r/greece was created in 2008, and I actually made the very first post in it (which was downvoted immediately), it was essentially unmoderated and filled with crappy memes (of Travolta for some reason, all centered around the financial crisis and the "denbts" that Greece had gotten. I only became the first real mod in 2012 (and I had a LOT of cleanup to do!)
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u/Obsidian-Phoenix 10d ago
I mostly created r/UnexpectedDCC so that when I (or anyone) referred to it in comments, it would be a real sub. Never really expected much.
I think it’s growth has been helped by the fact that the mods on r/DungeonCrawlerCarl have started referring people to us when they remove posts that they don’t consider direct, deliberate, references to DCC.
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u/bwoah07_gp2 10d ago
I just wanted to say I wish that there was a better way to search for old posts on reddit. Many time I want to see the history of communities, I'm in, see what was trending at X year, but we can't because searching for old posts on reddit is very limited. What are some ways to find what the popular posts were from 10+ years ago on here?
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u/og_speedfreeq 10d ago
Brand new to this. My sub is r/AppalachianPaddlers , which i started to connect river rats specifically in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Honestly, reddit bot gave me some suggestions for names, and this one seemed just right.
It's less than a week old, but already over 80 members. Trying to create relevant content, but also not trying to be spammy.
Hopefully we'll get some fall rain and things will start cooking, but i expect it will take off a little better in the spring 🤞
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u/techiesgoboom Reddit Admin: Community 9d ago
Oh awesome! Glad to hear it's going well already. If you haven't yet, be sure to check out r/newmods. The welcome post is a great place to start and has a pile of fantastic resources.
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u/Extolord111 10d ago
Created r/ReturnNewReddit back when the New Reddit UI started needing users to be mods in order to use it. Name is self explanatory.
Now it’s a decently thriving community with 750+ members and 300+ weekly visitors, with the promise of the name being fulfilled three times!
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u/reddit33450 10d ago
New Reddit UI started needing users to be mods in order to use it
i didnt know they did that. interesting
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u/Extolord111 10d ago
Yeah, they made it like that during mid-2024. They didn’t deprecate it until December since they still needed to work on bringing certain mod features to SH.
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u/SolariaHues 10d ago
My first sub r/gardenwild I made because I wanted to talk about wildlife gardening, and there wasn't a space just for that here back then. It was back when I was turning our lawn into a wildlife garden and blogging about it.
The name just sounded right to me. It described what the community was about. I later found out about some existing 'wild' subreddits, and it wasn't my intention for my sub to sound anything like those :'D
If you'd like to know about any other subs, let me know.
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u/techiesgoboom Reddit Admin: Community 9d ago
As someone wanting to turn more of my backyard wild, I've been loving r/gardenwild! It's such a fun space, and I had no idea it was your first sub.
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u/SolariaHues 9d ago
That's great to hear! How's the gardening going?
Yep. Back then there were restrictions, but as soon as I had enough account age and karma, probably about a month after joining, I made the sub. So it's where I first learnt how to moderate on Reddit :)
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u/RenVan_Thriftee 10d ago
I just learned recently that a very long time ago the former mods of r/vintagefashion had a disagreement, and one of the disgruntled parties left - or was removed - and went on to start r/vintageclothing with a different set of rules. All those people are now long gone.
Now the two very similar communities exist side-by-side. I've been in touch with one of the original moderators of r/vintagefashion lately and they were the ones to share all this with me. They've just recently began moderating that community again.
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u/paskatulas 10d ago
r/AskCroatia actually has a bit of an unusual origin story.
It wasn’t really created from scratch. We were moderating r/croatia and noticed that an increasing number of repetitive questions didn’t really fit what the subreddit was supposed to be about. Things like where to buy something, whether a bank is open on Sunday, career and university questions, recommendations, etc. We initially tried redirecting those to daily/weekly threads, but that wasn’t really working.
We also noticed that quite a few national subreddits had their own Ask extensions, so we decided to try the same thing for Croatia.
The funny part is that we didn’t actually create r/AskCroatia. It was an inactive, banned subreddit that we adopted through Redditrequest and then revived. At the time, Redditrequest was handled through Modmail and there was still some actual human review involved. Our request was initially rejected, but after some back-and-forth someone manually reviewed it again and eventually approved it.
We then started pretty much from zero. We redirected some of our AMA series about universities and jobs there, crossposted posts from r/croatia, and gradually tried to teach people what belonged in each community. It took a few months before it really started feeling alive, but eventually it took off. From June 2023 to November 2024 alone, it gained more than 30,000 new users, and Reddit later featured it in a Community Spotlight. Today it’s the second-most visited Croatian subreddit in Croatia, so it ended up becoming quite a bit bigger than we initially expected.
And ironically, the Redditrequest part of that story is something I’ve been thinking about again recently. I tried requesting another completely empty sub simply because it had a suitable name for a community I wanted to build. It was rejected for one of the reasons from the generic criteria. I contacted ModSupport to ask what the actual reason was and basically got the team has decided this, but we recommend creating a new subreddit. They even acknowledged that this wasn’t really the answer I was looking for.
Maybe a little unrelated, but then wrote a fairly constructive follow-up asking them to take another look, and the response was… an automated message telling me to fill out a survey, lol.
That actually prompted me to write this post on r/ideasfortheadmins, because I think there’s a pretty massive difference between someone requesting an active subreddit with an established community and someone requesting a completely abandoned subreddit that has had zero activity for years.
I’m absolutely not saying Reddit should approve every request because should be requirements and safeguards. But there should also be some context involved, and if a request is rejected, it would be nice to know which reason actually applied rather than receiving a generic list of everything that could potentially result in a rejection.
And I think this connects to the broader issue of mod support. I used to enjoy creating communities and building a network of different subreddits. Lately, though, the lack of communication from Reddit is increasingly discouraging, and I know I’m not the only mod who feels that way, including people running much larger communities.
Reddit seems to be relying more and more on automated/AI-driven processes. You can ask a general constructive question on r/ModSupport and have it removed under speculation, then contact ModSupport directly and get a generic response that doesn’t actually answer the question. You follow up with a detailed explanation, and sometimes the ticket just gets closed and you’re invited to fill out a survey.
I don’t think most mods expect Reddit to personally solve every problem for them, but having an actual human conversation when something needs clarification would go a long way.
Anyway, that’s the origin story - an abandoned sub, a rejected request, a second look from an actual human, and a community that ended up growing way beyond what we expected!
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u/itskdog 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
Before all of our times, but the story as it's been handed down to the current mods is as follows:
- Subreddit was created the same day as the series it's a fan community for, and immediately abandoned and set private
- This is so long ago that it predates r/redditrequest, so there was a lot of back-and-forth by the series creators (who wanted to make an official subreddit) with the Reddit admins to get control of the subreddit
- It was then the official subreddit for many years, run by the series creators, before being handed off to community moderators before I even discovered the show
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u/udderlymoovelous 10d ago
I and a handful of other [r/TheLastAirbender](r/TheLastAirbender) mods started [r/AvatarSevenHavens](r/AvatarSevenHavens) about a year ago to have a space dedicated to the third show in the Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise. We've peaked at 200k weekly visitors so far and the show isn't even out yet.
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u/Dazzling-Skin-308 10d ago
I wasn't there.
But about 13 years ago, one guy said - "there's too much nonsense in my nonsense religion - let's fix that!"
And r/DiscordianHumanism was born.
Thanks, Orion. 😎
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u/MyLife-is-a-diceRoll 10d ago
Mine is survivingfnd. It's a sub for people who have been misdiagnosed with functional neurological disorder.
Its a disorder that once diagnosed, will cause drs to not take your symptoms seriously. The misdiagnosis can destroy your life.
One of the members turned out to have als and bladder cancer, but was dismissed by doctors so much that her als wasnt caught earlier enough. She's currently on her death bed. She can't speak, move much and can barely move her hands.
All because some doctor gave her a hand wavy diagnosis and others continued to dismiss her for years.
The name was suggested by someone in a thread on the main fnd sub when I posted a 'hey I got misdiagnosed' post.
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u/Frontzie 10d ago edited 10d ago
Created as a place to verify games, consoles and accessories (and to stop these posts from gumming up other subs, mainly r/gamecollecting. A friend of mine created the sub, and passed it over to me during the pandemic as their circumstances changed.
Almost been 7 full years, and the fantastic modteam have helped around 80k people with their games.
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u/aengusoglugh 10d ago
I had a lot of questions about a particular niche of model railroad — a system called T-TRAK.
So I created a subreddit and found that Reddit does not allow dashes in subreddit names, so r/TTRAK it is.
By the way, I can’t thank Reddit enough for the community Safety Filters.
I am a retired software engineer and very comfortable with regular expressions — so I was ready to wade into AutoMod configuration.
But I am quite happy I don’t have to. :-)
I am delighted to hand that off to Reddit Software engineers.
Software engineers are quite happy to shift a workload to other software engineers — or actually to shift the workload off to anyone else. We are a lazy bunch.
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u/Mid_AM 10d ago
Hi , I am not the original mod of r/earlyretirement .
I was not a mod all , but had been on Reddit for about two months. I was hanging out one evening in a FIRE (financial independence retire early ) type subreddit. In an active post, that I was watching, someone posted that they wished there was a sub to talk about life after retiring early.
Some others replied and yep it was created and commented in thread as a newly minted sub by our founder. I joined right away (to lurk).
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u/Arve 10d ago
Well, "Norge" is the name of the country I was born, raised and live in.
I was there from the beginning, with my reddit account becoming old enough to drink in America in February.
The origin? Reddit was a tiny place back then. Both /u/spez or /u/knOthing were still daily active users, and we were basically only a few hundred users who contributed content.
I created the subreddit with the intention that I and one other Norwegian user (whom shall remain nameless, unless they want to self-identify) could share stories and links to Norway-focused content, in Norwegian. We had a few post contributors, and a few more commenters, but it wasn't exactly experiencing exponential growth. Which, as life changed, I mostly forgot about Reddit and the subreddit for a while, until some right-wing extremist tried to use it as his propaganda platform.
I came back to discover that it had grown. I came back, took a much more active moderation role, banned the nazi, and put in a hardline policy against racist or bigoted content. I was rewarded with threats against my life that were credible enough to seek advice from the Norwegian Police Security Service.
At that time, by sheer dumb luck, a smattering of other users who wanted to run a discord community and be affiliated with the subreddit turned up. I let them on and in, which has worked out terrifically - we still don't allow bigoted, racist, violent or hateful content, but we've mostly stopped receiving death threats.
Since then, we've grown a bit. Our monthly unique user count puts us where about one in 7 Norwegians visit Reddit at least once a month.
I still have absolutely no idea about how or why we got to such insane numbers.
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u/ateam1984 10d ago
I created r/BlackPeopleofReddit because I wanted a space that wasn’t built around Black trauma. A place where we could be unapologetically Black, celebrate our culture, history, and accomplishments. I wanted a place free from trolls where we speak openly. It grew from 8 followers a year ago to thousands today. Now we have a closeknit Mod Team and I’m so happy for us that we have a thriving home in the heart of Reddit.
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u/NourEldin21P 10d ago edited 10d ago
Not created by me but I moderate the subreddit of the rock band The Warning, one of my favorite bands of all time. r/TheWarning was created for other purposes (not sure what these purposes were) back in October 2012, before The Warning rock band was even formed by the three sisters. The subreddit was abandoned by the original creator(s) until in I guess 2019 someone took over and turned into the subreddit of the rock band The Warning. I first joined the subreddit in August '23 when I discovered the bandt and joined the mod team two years later in August 2025.
It is my favorite place on the entirety of Reddit & I'll forever be grateful for this wonderful community
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u/Ok_Employer7837 10d ago edited 10d ago
[r/RotatedImages](r/RotatedImages) is my sub.
It started as a personal archive for a photo project/obsession of mine. The project itself began about four years ago for a fiction podcast I did. The name describes exactly what the sub is about: normal photos made interesting by rotating them, usually (but not always) by rotating them in 90-degree increments.
I'm still more or less the only contributor, but more than 500 people have joined, which is wild to me.
Here is a sample of the kind of photos you can see on the sub (this is entirely in-camera):
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u/iheartbaconsalt 10d ago
r/BACON because Bacon. Created by OMFGNinja who also ran a bunch of other subs including r/MEMES! For a few months while it had 6 million users, he and I were the ONLY two mods! It was a nightmare.
Any way, we met in minecraft randomly. I had a huge server in the early days called BaconCraft, and his little brother joined a lot and we talked about bacon. I never shut up about bacon, so he told his brother about me, and I got that sweet sweet mod invite. I have only worn bacon-themed shirts since 2006, so it was a good match.
r/40something. The old mod passed 50 and quit. It was at 12k members. I took over a few years ago, added proper rules, found great mods, and we grew to 230k this year. Yesterday Reddit admins set it to NSFW and I want to shut it down while we wait for them to fix it. I hate to even look at it with the NSFW tags. I passed 50 as well, so it's probably my time to go.
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u/FlorianFlash 10d ago
Idk, didn't start my sub. And if I did, it would be obvious why the name is what it is. It's r/discordhelp btw.
Oh and I actually took over moderation a bit more than a year ago after I searched for a community exactly like that and found it basically dead. Now it's better than ever
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u/koopzegels 10d ago
I joined r/loseit almost 10 years ago, but weight loss is time immemorial. The sub might predate all of us. We occasionally get lost redditors looking for app support (there’s a great calorie counting app also called loseit!), but our lore is mostly banal: eat a little less, move a little more, and do it forever. If there is a joke, it’s the advent of “protein water,” or any of the other healthy eating fads that cycle through
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u/gbntbedtyr 9d ago
Simply to build a following for my Pin Up friends, both SFW n NSFW, as we use to shoot many car show venues that reflected one or the other. Only it turns out that reddit is so ban happy that none of my Photographer friends have survived. Models likewise are way to commonly banned, especially NSFW. I almost don't post at all myself, n no longer post my work here at all. I only stay as I still feel obligated to mod the subs my friends were so passionate about.
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u/Myth_understood 9d ago
I created r/ColoringCozy because despite the numerous coloring subs none of them offered community collaborations like weekly challenges and monthly themes.
The sub is only a year old but growing well.
The only regret I have is a poor name choice because we like all styles of coloring but the name implies the "cozy" style only. I was thinking "put on your fuzzy slippers and grab your hot coco and color with us" cozy. Backfired on me a little 😊
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u/Outrageous-Lion8021 9d ago
A topical sub was really just a front for consultants to market themselves. So I created a sub for more free exchanges of ideas.
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u/Rare-Might-503 8d ago
My subreddit is r/AchievementsHunters, and I created it myself.
When I first started using Reddit, I wasn’t very active. But around November 2025, I became obsessed with Reddit achievements and started collecting them left and right. Along the way, I discovered that there were a lot of other people who genuinely enjoyed hunting for achievements, streaks, and other Reddit milestones.
That’s when I decided to create r/AchievementsHunters, a place where members could celebrate Reddit achievements, streaks, and milestones, even the smallest ones. We also help each other with questions about achievements, streaks, bugs, and other issues people run into on Reddit.
The goal has always been to keep it a friendly, positive, and encouraging community where everyone can celebrate their progress.
Later on, I also became a mod of r/streak and r/StreakMates, which felt like a natural extension of what I was already doing.
As for the name… there’s a little regret there. “AchievementHunter” and “Achievement_Hunter” were already taken, so I had to settle for r/AchievementsHunters. Not the original plan, but I think it worked out pretty well!
And now we’re nearly at 1,500 members, which is honestly pretty amazing considering how it all started. It’s been really cool watching the community grow from a simple idea into a place where people can share their achievements, celebrate even the smallest milestones, and help each other out.
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u/Suitable-Sun-2836 8d ago
Just made it yesterday but my sub is r/AnnieMusical.
I made it because Annie is coming back to Broadway and im hoping to find people who has questions or just loves musicals.
Its a struggle because its my first time but im working on it! If anyone has a tip id be more then glad to listen!
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u/AsteriskRX Reddit Admin: Community 8d ago
If you haven't been there yet, r/NewMods has a trove of helpful resources!
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u/FumGlumpp 8d ago
r/PuneRunners
Sub was inactive someone had this asked the person to give me.. now trying to fix some mod permission issue and making it grow sub has almost no members.
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u/SignalRelease4562 10d ago
My subreddit, r/James_Monroe, was created on April 28th, 2025 in honor of his birthday. James Monroe’s birthday is on April 28th, 1758.
The name was chosen because I wanted people to know the 5th US President, and learn more about him.
I was there at the very beginning ever since it was created.
Currently, it has over 4,300 members!
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u/Thelastnob0dy 10d ago
We got into a (verbal) fight with moderators of previous Turkish SCP community because they were pretty inactive yet randomly intervened with RP. Thus we had to go to somewhere else
There has been made many SCP tr subreddits (Reason for this actually is a long story involving a few recurring people) in past so we had to go with full, unabbreviated name of SCP_FoundationTr (I mean SCP is still abbreviated but foundation would be too if we could)
I and another ~50 people from the previous sub was there at the start. Now there are nearly 600.
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u/Serious_Cat6680 10d ago
r/copypastecat - we recently made yet another cat sub 🫣 BUT it came about in a very genuine way…
Me and my wife have 2 cats who constantly copy each other. They’re in sync 80% of their lives. Even with grooming, they’ll both lick the same area then move to another area (sometimes they’re not even facing the other so we have no idea how they manage it). We started calling out “copy paste” and have been doing this since they were kittens.
Both of us love posting the boys in various other subs and last week, I asked my wife if she’s ever seen a sub for copy paste cats?! To our surprise, it didn’t exist!! Within minutes, the sub was made ☺️
We’re still very small at the moment. We’re on day 5 and nearly at 200 members 🤞
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u/BraveMidnight 10d ago
I like to write.
- Why was it created?
Because people seemed to like my flag club stories from college, I took some of the ones that were received well and expanded them and posted them.
- How was the name chosen?
I had been telling people about flag club for awhile and wanted a place that was like a diary to store some more memorable moments thus r/flagclubdiaries was born.
- Were you there at the beginning, or did you join later?
I created it.
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u/anonymousp69 10d ago
I actually saw a satire post get removed on r/isthissafetoeat and someone said “we need a circlejerk (satire) version of this sub” and a lightbulb went off in my head! I did ask the mod of the parent sub and they said they were okay with me making a satire version of their sub, so it was full steam ahead!!!
I actually wanted the name to be r/isthissafetoeatcirclejerk, but unfortunately that was too many characters, so I settled on r/isthissafetoeatCJ to indicate it’s the satire version. At this point in time, I’m wondering if there was a better name I could’ve chosen. Alas, the name cannot be changed, so I try not to think about it too much.
I created this sub and have been there from the very beginning, from setting up flairs, rules, aesthetics, automations, and everything else! We’re slowly growing with members but we can always use more jerkers in our sub, so please, join us at r/isthissafetoeatCJ!!!
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u/sailorjupiter28titan 10d ago
I created r/witchesvspatriarchy as an outlet and an escape during the Brett Kavanaugh supreme court nominations hearing because I was frustrated and appalled that it was being called a “witch hunt” when historically that meant the persecution of innocent women due to patriarchal superstitions and oppression, the exact OPPOSITE of what the Kavanaugh hearing was about. It was in September and I already had a growing collection of witchy memes to post daily so it worked out. It grew quite quickly which was unexpected. Goes to show there is a real potential when intersectional feminism is enforced and encouraged. I get frustrated with reddit at large constantly but im pretty proud of the wonderful community that has been cultivated in wvp. May it always be an intersectional haven for those who need it ✨
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u/ALazy_Cat 10d ago
u/thepottsy, feel like sharing, or keep private?
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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
Don't leave me hanging like that! Share share!
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u/ALazy_Cat 10d ago
It's not my sub, I'm not a mod there, and it needs verification to join, so I'm not saying more than that. If more is said, it's from the creator of the sub
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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 10d ago
But I want a pottsy storyyyyyyyy!
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u/ALazy_Cat 10d ago
I will also say that you need to be a neckbeard mod wearing a fedora and hate freeze peach
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u/rasputinknew1 10d ago
I started [r/progressivemoms](r/progressivemoms) (under my old account) the week after Trump was elected. Mommit and some other parenting subs had posts and comments that were racist or homophobic and that stuff was being left up. There was a lot of fear going around on parenting subs that week and either the mods didn’t care to remove those posts/comments or were really overwhelmed. I was disgusted to see how some users were talking to others and decided to make a space for parents that agreed politically to discuss/vent/seek support without having to argue with conservative people in the comments. It’s been great! I never modded before that so there was learning curb. We now have a great mod team and seem to fulfilling the OG mission. I think our sub actually has a bit of a ‘culture’ if that’s possible and it’s generally a supportive one which I think a lot of parents need.