The World Is Full Of Surprises: 46 Pictures That Prove It

Moderator MaxLemon told Bored Panda that even though the subreddit gets lots of content, it's not so terribly expansive that moderating is impossible.

"Essentially, we utilize the AutoModerator function to highlight key words and phrases as well as post types. Then we hand review those highlights and either approve or remove said postings. AutoModerator only highlights about 5-10% of the posts in a queue of 100 per page, however, and so the majority of the work is going through manual reports and making a judgement call on whether or not something follows our community guidelines."

According to MaxLemon, sometimes the moderating tasks are pretty easy. "Like if there's a poorly written title, if there's text on an image, or if it's obviously spam. In other cases, you have to act like a detective and build a picture of why something got reported or if the user who is being reported is genuine," they explained that the moderators' job can get pretty hectic at times.

"It should be no surprise that with a subreddit as large as ours that there is always an attempt to advertise from a third party or scam the users and so part of our work is rooting out those false people, countering their spam tactics, etc."

We also wanted to find out MaxLemon's opinion about where the line between something that's "just" interesting and intersting [very] lies. "The line is hard to define, to be honest, and it definitely varies by moderator. If the same thing was posted multiple times on our subreddit, it's no longer interesting [very], much less interesting. If it feels like it fits more on /r/mildyinteresting, then it's not iaf."

Like the moderators of the subreddit say, their community is meant for “almost anything” that people find incredibly interesting. And with that kind of content, it’s no surprise that people have been flooding in since 2008 (yup, the subreddit has been online for over 12 staggering years!).

The size of the subreddit is absolutely shocking. So much so that the team curating the content that makes its way to the front page of the subreddit has some help from automated moderators to help keep everything flowing nicely. Two of the mods are AIs: AutoModerator and BotDefense. It only makes sense to enlist their help when your community has boomed to such an extent. Let’s just hope that the AI mods don’t turn against their fellow redditors.

Why we find some things interesting and think other things are boring is more complicated than it seems. Tom Vanderbilt, author of ‘You May Also Like,’ spoke with ‘The Atlantic’s’ Julie Beck about why people like things. According to him, our taste (i.e. our likes and dislikes) is humanity’s way of ordering information and filtering the world.

Taste is also a form of social learning that has turned into a way of figuring out what activities and things are linked to prestige. In other words, if someone we respect likes something or finds something interesting, then you’d better bet your bottom dollar that we’ll instinctively want to check it out.

“There’s no silver bullet theory for explaining anyone's taste. It's always a mixture of exposure, of culture, of a person's personality. And none of these are particularly static or fixed. The nice thing about tastes is that they are subject to change. We can kind of always be reinventing them and reinventing ourselves a little bit,” Vanderbilt said.

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