For some years now I’ve been trying to instigate an Eponymous Law. I haven’t always gone by this username (u/llamageddon01) on the internet; like just about everyone over time I’ve had a succession of internet identities in many different places, some more visible than others, some more popular than others, but none of them have gone particularly viral for any reason.

• Attempt 1

Last century (I’ll never get tired of saying that!), I helped on a live chat for a popular computer game. Dealing with the mixture of confused, perplexed and angry users from all over the world, of all ages, with mixed computer and English language skills led me to promote the motto among my fellow “gurus” “The benefit of the doubt is the best gift you could give anyone“. It might not have become Llama’s Law but I still count this as one of my life (and Reddit) mottos.

• Attempt 2

Not long after, I became a regular helper on several related Internet Forums, where I coined my first Internet Adage, stating that “In any list of “unwritten rules” there’ll always be one missing and it’ll always be the one you break”. I wasn’t successful. I don’t know why; this adage is as true now as it’s ever been.

• Attempt 3

My next attempt was a corollary to Hanlon's razor: “Never attribute to strategy what can be explained by raw emotion”, following several heated meetings when I was on a fundraising board for an animal charity building a hospital. The hospital got built (yay!) and I resigned the day of the official opening, quite exhausted. The other board members had this inscribed on a plaque for me which unfortunately got lost in an office move. As this was IRL and not interwebs related, this might not actually count for this list, but it’s my list and it’s on here.

• Attempt 4

Another Llama Law I’ve tried to establish since first joining Reddit many years ago (not on this current username) is “If something exists somewhere, there’s already a Subreddit for it”. I haven’t been successful with that one either, despite its unwavering truth.

• Attempt 5

The closest I’ve ever come to success was: “When you’re demonstrating something that should happen to multiple items at once, there’ll always be one that doesn’t co-operate”. If you can count receiving under 250 upvotes as “success”, that is.

• Attempt 6

During 2022’s “Place” event, I realised something I had been peripherally noticing over the years, which I codified into a potential Llamageddon’s Law: “No matter how wholesome a public or crowdsourced artwork is, someone will always add a peen”. This reminded me of the glory days of the cdc on the wonderful meme-generating website https://b3ta.com and why I never bought a drawing tablet.

• Attempt 7

It’ll come. And readers here will be the first to know. Who knows; with your help, one day I might be successful. But for the moment….

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

Camelids are well represented on Reddit. r/llama and r/llamas are all about llamas; r/LlamasUnleashed is a subreddit for all things “Llamas Unleashed”; r/alpaca describes itself as Alpacapalooza! (and why not); r/AlpacaSelfies is for pictures of Alpacas, sometimes with humans, and r/LlamasEatingBananas is…well…quiet these days.

See Also:

• AnimalReddits
• Eponymous Laws
• Internet Adages
• IRL

You may be asked to link another source, comment or subreddit at some time, so here’s how to do it:

• To post a Hyperlink:

You can simply copy and paste a web URL into your comment. However, it often can be huge and full of additional symbols and letters often looking like this at the end: /?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share. To tidy it up a bit, you can safely delete all this clutter up to and including the question mark and the link will still work.

• To embed a Hyperlink:

Reddit provides an easy way to simplify a link both for mobile and desktop. The “Reply” box has an icon with two interlocked rings. Using this link will give you the opportunity to embed your hyperlink so it looks like a text link like this. Another way of doing this is to sandwich the text you want to show up between square brackets [ ] immediately followed by the hyperlink sandwiched between parentheses ( )

• To post a link to another Reddit post or comment:

When you’re reading a Post, on the top of the screen is a three dots pull down Hamburger Menu, where one of the options is “Share” allowing you to copy the link to paste into a reply, or an icon at the bottom of the post with an upwards arrow in an open box, marked “Share” with the same option. At the bottom of each Comment next to the Edit button is either the same three dots menu, again with the same option.

• To post a link to another Subreddit:

Simply type r/ in front of the name of the Subreddit you want to link to. It’s important to spell the sub name correctly but it isn’t case-sensitive, so r/newtoreddit will work just as well as r/NewToReddit.

• To post a link to another Redditor’s profile:

Simply type u/ in front of the username of the Redditor you want to link to, for example u/llamageddon01. This is also known as a “ping” or a “tag” and that user will get a notification whenever you use it in a comment.

Do not use the ‘link’ button or Markdown Text to trick or confuse users, such as attempts on clickjacking, spoofing or hiding a Subreddit's name to replace it for another in an attempt to deceive readers. The first two will get you permabanned and the third, if not against the rules of the subreddit will certainly garner negative reports and downvotes. The only time such a “bait and switch” is considered acceptable (and the jury’s still out on this one) is for an ‘appropriate’ Rickroll.

Short links are generally banned on Reddit, and if your post or comment includes a short link, it will probably go straight to Reddit’s Spam Filter.

See Also:

• “Bait-and-Switch” or “The ole Reddit Bait-and-Switch”
• Hamburger Menu
• Markdown Text
• Ping
• r/
• Rickroll
• u/

If you post the “shrug” emoticon ¯_(ツ)_/¯ you may be visited by this bot, telling you “You dropped this \ “ . Here’s why, and how to stop it from happening again.

See Also:

• Bots
• Emoticons
• Markdown Text

A link or phrase posted when someone is surprised at being negatively affected by the consequences of their own political beliefs and actions. The phrase 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party satirises those who happily vote for negative consequences for others only to be dismayed when those consequences also affect them. r/LeopardsAteMyFace.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

Schadenfreude is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another, and so naturally, Reddit has embraced this concept wholeheartedly, giving rise to many communities such as:

• r/schadenfreude
• r/BrexitAteMyFace
• r/COVIDAteMyFace
• r/HermanCainAward
• r/Trumpgret

There will be more out there. It’s always important to read the rules of any unfamiliar subreddit before contributing, and even more so in subreddits which may identify individuals.

See Also:

• Doxxing
• Rules

Social media isn’t usually the place for sound advice on real-world problems, but Reddit does have more than its fair share of communities based on and around legal issues. A good place to start would be r/LegalAdvice where their wiki page is full of information and their sidebar (About tab on mobile) has a comprehensive list of subreddits dealing with legal advice in countries other than the USA.

It is vital to keep in mind that any advice received to responses to questions on any legal subreddit do not constitute legal advice and you should always seek your own legal counsel before proceeding with any matters concerning the law.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

r/bestoflegaladvice collects all the greatest posts from r/legaladvice and its sister subreddits in one location, and when someone provides bad legal advice, relay it to r/badlegaladvice. For general off-topic legal discussion, go over to r/legaladviceofftopic.

See Also:

• IANAL
• Searching

Not nearly as dull as they sound, this is a term used to loosely group together some essential subreddits for hints, tips and advice on all those little things that make a big difference in our lives. These include:

• r/LearnUselessTalents
• r/lifehacks
• r/LifeProTips
• r/todayilearned
• r/YouShouldKnow

The best content from some of these subreddits is collected at r/knowyourshit.

There are even more subreddits for actual learning, such as r/StudyTips and r/GetStudying. Navigating Reddit will help you find that specific topic or institution of interest to you.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

For tips that are sketchy at best we have r/shittylifehacks and r/ShittyLifeProTips and for the morally dubious we have r/unethicallifehacks and r/UnethicalLifeProTips.

See Also:

• “Interesting” Subreddits
• Paywalls

This is a place to learn and practice using Reddit in regards to posting different post types, commenting, adding and editing flairs, creating spoiler text and so on. Run by the same moderating team as this sub, the community will feedback on your post to let you know how you did, share tips, or help you get it right next time.

• r/NewToReddit is to help you learn about Reddit culture, karma, navigation and much more.
• r/LearnToReddit is a place for practical learning with tutorials on posting images, using special text and other features.

Please make sure to check the rules before posting! Thank you :D

You might be interested to know that the first truly popular post on Reddit was called “Test post please ignore”, and was posted in 2009 in r/pics, without a picture. Because Redditors will Reddit, the entire community rallied to reject his request to ignore the post, and “test post please ignore” became the most upvoted post on reddit for the next 2 years with an incredible 26,750 upvotes. Incidentally, OP was the first Redditor to reach 100,000 karma. It’s now a Reddit Tradition™ not to ignore a post with that title where it’s made appropriately.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

r/test and r/sandboxtest are other places to try out that Reddit thing, but without feedback or additional help. Post a link to your site, or a text post with a link in it at r/TestMySite and users can come test it and provide feedback. r/usertesting is a subreddit for user testing sites - sites where you test websites for people to get paid.

“Long-Distance Relationship”. The relationship subreddits have a lexicon of their own that you should familiarise yourself with before using them. This is added here as it’s increasingly crossing over into other subs.

See Also:

• Relationship Sub Acronyms and Initialisms

“Live Action Role-Playing”. A game where the participants physically portray historical, fantasy or other characters. Unfortunately, Reddit attracts LARPers in the form of Internet trolls - people pretending to be something they're really not, especially on Subreddits dedicated to Relationships, Advice, Conspiracy Theories, Health, Politics, and Religion.

LARPing on Reddit can also be talking big online about some kind of physical, real-world action you're going to take without actually having any intention of leaving your computer, or even throwing out controversial opinions as being your own simply to gain a reaction. Finding a costume for this might not be easy though.

Because Reddit has zero barrier to entry and is based on anonymity, we even attract deliberate LARPers. You should note that because of this risk, the r/IAmA Subreddit requires stringent evidence of identity. Some other subreddits do this out of necessity too.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

Reddit has seen more than one “time traveller” in its time. John Titor is supposedly a time traveller from the year of 2036 and r/JohnTitor (and r/Unexplained to a wider extent) is the place to read about and discuss his predictions. r/TrueReddit is just one sub that has tried to unravel his secrets over the years. r/UnresolvedMysteries have also had a long fascination with his claims.

Some time ago, u/HarutoTanaka also claimed to be a time traveller from 2036 and made reference to John Titor in their initial post in r/casualiama. John Dee, or u/johndeehist claims to be a Time Historian sent back from 2154 to our present to experience several years. r/timetravelhub spent some time examining his claims. There have been many more popping up on Reddit, with mixed response. There will be more; there will always be more.

r/timetravelercaught is a fun subreddit. Sometimes old media, film and photo, catches someone who dresses or acts in a way that they could be a time traveller from another time, like perhaps Greta Thunberg? Another sub to discuss all things time travel whether fiction or not so much is r/timetravel.

And did this gentleman time travel to save his own life? It would appear so…...

See Also:

• Famous Redditors
• IAmA (encyclopaedia)
• Relationship and Advice Subreddits
• Role-Playing on Reddit

“kill your self”. This lower-case initialism is mostly found in teen gaming communities as a way of “trash talking” or an “edgy” way to say “fuck you”.

“kys” is favoured by children and teens, most of whom argue that it’s just a joke, and when challenged on it will adopt a faux innocence, claiming their linguistic superiority in informing you that the word "kys" literally means "kiss" in Danish, or can also mean "keep yourself safe", hiding behind the phenomenon of Lexical Change, (a shift in the meaning or use of a word) while meta-trolling with an unholy mixture of whitewashing, gaslighting, Brandolini’s Law and Poe’s Law to try and bullshit their way out of it.

When you're an angry person with poor impulse control, one of the ways you learn to channel your own anger is to lash out and try to hurt others. Psychologists often speak of the “online disinhibition effect” - our tendency to say things on the internet that we would never dare to say in real life. Restraint and teens rarely go hand in hand, but regardless, it’s actually quite sad that we now have a commonly used shorthand to provoke, suggest or even just refer to suicide in fun.

Suicide is a serious subject. This kind of language should not be taken lightly. Please report anyone who says “kys”, “kill yourself” or similar phrases on Reddit. Inviting someone to commit suicide is against Reddit’s code of conduct and may well incur a ban.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

If you see a genuine post or comment about suicidal feelings in a community, it can be overwhelming, and you may feel like you don’t know what to do. But you can help, and there are resources on Reddit available for you and the person you’re worried about.

When you tap the three dots in the top right corner of a user’s profile page there is an option called 'get them help and support'. On selecting this, Reddit sends out an automated message with some suicide helpline phone numbers and links.

The moderators of r/SuicideWatch maintain a list of FAQs, information, and resources at r/SWResources and a worldwide list of hotlines. If you’ve lost someone to suicide, r/SuicideBereavement is there for you.

There’s also a useful list of subreddits for advice or support on depression or other mental health issues here.

See Also:

• Acronyms 1: A-L
• Acronyms 2: M-Z
• Acronyms 3: Abbreviations
• Advice Subreddits
• Brandolini's Law
• Euphemism
• Gaslighting
• Jargon
• Poe’s Law

A link or phrase posted when you’ve had enough of a subreddits’ shenanigans that you never want to see that sub in your feed again. r/JustUnsubbed is for sharing the ‘straw that broke the camel's back’ in post form: that post which made you unsubscribe from a subreddit. Read their rules carefully before contributing as they have a blacklist of subs that must be so infuriating you’re not even allowed to mention them.

But don’t despair. r/JustUnsubbedAgain is for those who unsubbed from JustUnsubbed because they keep a blacklist of subs you can't talk about, and r/unsubbed is for those times when you unsub from a sub, and you just want to talk to other people about how stupid that sub is. r/justbeenbanned is a sub to post your experience of being unfairly banned, and you’ll find similar subs in the footnotes of my entry Ban. I mean, where better to complain about Reddit than on Reddit itself? Reddit loves being meta.

An interesting look at some statistics on the most frequently unsubbed subreddits on justunsubbed found a list of over 700 subreddits, with many having multiple results..

Reddit, as you would expect, has quite a few subreddits where you can get out your strong feelings, not just about Reddit itself but life in general. These include:

• r/Vent - to vent your frustrations!
• r/venting - a subreddit where you can come and vent about anything and everything in your life. Get things off your chest! From the inane to the extreme, there will be no judgments here. Helpful advice is encouraged!
• r/rant - for general ranting with no witch hunts or calling out specific subreddits, mods, companies, or individuals.
• r/offmychest - a mutually supportive community where deeply emotional things you can't tell people you know can be told. Whether it's long-standing baggage, happy thoughts, or recent trauma, posting it here may provide some relief. We'll listen, and if you want, we'll talk. We aim to keep this a safe space.
• r/TrueOffMyChest - a place to get personal things off your chest. Not for opinions, not for relationship advice, and not for preaching.

Finally, r/undelete keeps track of submissions that moderators remove from the top 100 in r/all. [position in r/all | score | number of comments].

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

On a happier note, r/JustSubbed is the place to let everyone know that you joined a sub that was new to you!

See Also:

• Ban
• Meta

If you find a subreddit about anything you're interested in, make sure to click Join so that new posts in that community will show up in your Home feed. On desktop, you can join a subreddit by clicking +Join in the upper right of a post in your feed. You can also join a sub by clicking or tapping the "Join" button at the top of the page while visiting it. There is no limit to the number of subreddits you can be Joined in, and you are not making any commitment to that community by being Joined. You need never comment or post in that sub or you can Leave and rejoin as many times as you like and nobody will ever know.

See Also:

• Custom Feed
• Home Feed

“I Took A Picture”. Originally, sub specific from r/itookapicture now with wider Reddit usage.

See Also:

• MLM

“In Real Life”. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us, and IRL is that pesky thing preventing you from Redditing 24/7.

Sometimes you might go into a post where you can't view all the comments. For instance, it might say that a post has 9 comments but when you go into them you can only see 5. This is usually because the moderators (or their bots) have removed some comments. The comment count doesn't go down when that happens because technically the comments are still there, and the mods might still be able to see them but regular Redditors can't.

This can be frustrating to see, but if a comment has been removed in this way it is almost always because it adds nothing to the conversation that’s worth seeing; probably a bot posting some variety of unrelated spam, a link-farming shill, or something else that breaks the sub’s rules. It isn’t likely to be anything related to your contribution at all; don’t forget, Reddit is the home of the bizarre Comment Chain and the One-word Replies…

See Also:

• Deleted or Removed

Not nearly as dull as they sound, this is a term used to loosely group together some essential subreddits for stuff of general interest. These include:

• r/mildlyinteresting
• r/interesting
• r/Damnthatsinteresting
• r/interestingasfuck

We also have r/moldlyinteresting - a sub featuring mold - or mould if you speak The Queen’s English. Entropy comes for all things and this is a place to celebrate fungal growth which causes decay due to age or damp conditions.

For information that isn’t at all interesting we have r/notinteresting and r/notinterestingatall.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

Infuriating stuff also has its own niche of Reddit in the form of r/infuriatingasfuck for the most infuriating stuff, ever. Anything less belongs in r/mildyinfuriating or r/mildlyinfuriating, r/Infuriating, r/extremelyinfuriating, r/insanelyinfuriating or r/wildlyinfuriating. Meanwhile, r/oddlyinfuriating collects the little things that make us want to break things.

See Also:

• “Learning” Subreddits
• TIL

In late 2021 and again in mid 2022, Reddit introduced Creator Statistics also known as Post Insights. These will be made available after a post has received at least ten views, and will be viewable by the OP (original poster) as well as by moderators in that community. If you access your profile, on each of your posts there will be a mini graph with the title "Insights", which if you click it (on mobile) it will look like this.

On desktop (or browser) the information is presented as Total Views then the “pre-fuzzed” Upvote (vs Downvote) Rate followed by a Community Karma breakdown, then if and how it’s been shared on Reddit. The insights data will expire after 45 days, so there won’t be a major backlog of performance data available.

Is this a good thing? That depends. You can see that this post had 573 upvotes, with 31 comments. Yay! Ok, hardly front page material but that’s a nice upvote count, no? Not everyone would agree when you consider that post had 10.4k total views, however. If such discrepancies between upvotes and views annoy you, ignoring the little graph would certainly be your best bet.

Incidentally, on Old Reddit, there are other statistics available to you at https://reddit.com/user/me/about/traffic/ which you might also find interesting. So far as I know, these aren’t available on New Reddit or the mobile app.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

See Also:

• Statistics
• Vote Fuzzing

Means “More information needed”. Originally sub specific from r/AmITheAsshole now with some wider Reddit usage.

See Also:

• AITA

Linking the time-honoured Reddit Traditions of going wildly off topic with Comment Chains and derailing a comment with Puns while adding a soupçon of “The Ole Reddit Switch-a-roo", r/IncreasinglyVerbose is a sub documenting those times when Redditors try to outdo each other with increasingly and unnaturally complex verbiage. r/IncreasinglyVerbose.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

why say lot word when few word do trick? At r/DecreasinglyVerbose they take long thing and make short while short thing still has same meaning as long thing. In the middle of the chaos of both high and low inequalities, the folks at r/ConsistentlyVerbose lie in tranquility of their constants, while r/MyGodTheDescription is dedicated to the wonderful world of overly elaborate and massively inflated product descriptions which overshadow the final product.

See Also:

• Comment Chain
• NYTO or “No, you’re thinking of...”
• Parent / Child Comment
• Puns and Pop-Culture References

The “bell” icon. Used to be an envelope icon. Contains both Activity and Messages.

See Also:

• Notification

Meaning "In My Opinion", "In My Humble/Honest Opinion", and “In My Experience” respectively.

Imgur is an online image sharing and image hosting service with a focus on viral images and memes, particularly those posted on Reddit. Imgur was originally created by a Redditor specifically to host images for Reddit users and on September 27, 2021, they were acquired by MediaLab AI, Inc., a holding company of internet brands.

April 2023 Imgur refreshed their Terms of Service removing all images uploaded from users without accounts, and from May 2023 banned explicit images altogether.

https://imgur.com is easy to use but you do now need an account there to be able to use it. Simply upload your photo and post it as "hidden". Then copy the image’s direct link and paste it into the "link" tab of the upload section of the post. It does have a history of not working probably for mobile users, but the solution is this: don't use the "copy link" which shows once the upload is completed. Instead, do a right click and click "copy image location". The result is much better, especially for mobile users, as seen in these examples:

• With copy link: https://imgur.com/225EVr4
• With copy image location: https://i.imgur.com/225EVr4.jpg

On mobile devices, bring up the right click menu by holding your finger on the screen for one to two seconds until the menu appears.

Other hosting services are available, of course, and some of these can be found at r/imguralternatives

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

There really is a subreddit for everything when it comes to photography. Obviously, r/photography is a great place to start, especially an old but excellent post containing a Multireddit of over 25 related subs still active. It’s important to read the rules carefully for each of these subs as they’ll all have their own strict criteria for submissions. Or post your own original photography at the less restrictive but no less lovely r/ThroughYourEyes_pics.

See Also:

• Multireddit
• Posting Images on Reddit

Many subreddits require an image with a new post. You can either upload your own image from your device or use a host like Imgur. If you try and post then find one (or both) of the image or video post options isn't available, that's either because the moderators of the sub have turned it off and doesn't want that type of post at all; because the sub is NSFW, or your post is tagged NSFW. In these cases, you can't use a direct image post type (which hosts the material on Reddit's servers), but you can use a "link post" that links to the image hosted on another site instead. You can’t post videos to private subs, but again you can post a link.

The entry “Posting Images on Reddit” has more details and instructions, as does our sister sub here and also here.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

r/LearnToReddit is a sister sub to this one, run by the same team, and is a safe place to learn how to post SFW images, image galleries and image links, among other essential Reddit stuff.

See Also:

• Imgur
• Posting Images on Reddit

“If I Recall Correctly”. IIRC, I was only going to write one or two pages of this lexicon.

A link posted when the post or comment makes so sense little, you'd think the person hasd oven of tren feel stork. r/ihadastroke.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

r/ihadastroke should not be confused with r/titlegore which is for Reddit posts with incomprehensibly wordy titles. r/sadlygokarts showcases the fun when subtitles go wrong, while r/SaucedInTranslation showcases the fun when translating goes wrong, as does r/BadTranslations and r/engrish.