40 People Share Things That Happened That Are So Rare, They Seem Nearly Impossible (New Pics)

Redditor u/solateor, one of the moderators, told Bored Panda that the person who "keeps the place running" is u/Hats_Hats_Hats. There's obviously a lot of respect between the members of the r/nevertellmetheodds mod team, and that's awesome news for the members.

u/solateor shared with us how the online community formed. According to them, the sub started right in this thread (and here's an archived version showing all the comments, too). "The sub started when I submitted this gif to the r/combinedgifs subreddit. In the thread, a bunch of users started commenting about the chances of something like that happening, which lead to the creation of the subreddit. A few of us from the comments joined on as moderators, and it was up and running after that," they told Bored Panda that the sub was a hit right away.

The moderators are clearly fun-loving people. For instance, when r/nevertellmetheodds was nearing 100k subscribers, u/solateor made this gif right here, based on the famous Han Solo quote, from Star Wars. "The 'banned' graphic is a reference to the fact that we ban users who mention the odds," they explained why C-3PO got banned in the gif.

The mod shared their thoughts about probability and rare events being seen seemingly 'everywhere.' "If you look at probability though the lens of a bell curve (and it could be argued a bell curve isn't representational here, but if we were) then improbable events are the statistical outliers you see on either end of the curve with very low chances of occurring but get 'air time' and visibility because they are in fact rare," they told Bored Panda.

According to them, even if rare events appear to be seen 'everywhere,' they're really just a fraction of the total events that take place "but make it in front of users to be 'consumed' because they are, in fact, rare."

Meanwhile, another moderator, u/Hats_Hats_Hats, added that one's perspective matters a lot when thinking about probabilities and rareness.

"If you shuffle a deck of 52 playing cards, the arrangement you get is one in about 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So it's super improbable if you look at it that way. But it's also kind of trivial, which is why we would remove a post that's just 'I shuffled this deck of cards and the result I got will never, ever happen again,'" they said.

"That's obviously a trivial example, but think of things like, 'Yesterday I ate one egg for breakfast, found two pennies on the floor, passed three ambulances on my way to work, got four phone calls before lunch, and got five texts during lunch. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5!' It sounds like numerology magic but really that person just ignored the nine socks in their drawer and the eleven emails they got in the afternoon because those didn't contribute to the 'miracle,'" they explained how people tend to pick and choose what information they feel is relevant or should be ignored.

"Wild coincidences are one thing. Genuinely interesting ones that aren't trivial like the deck of cards or reverse-engineered like the 1-2-3-4-5 day at work are different and special and that's why I love this subreddit," u/Hats_Hats_Hat said.

Over the past year and a half, the r/nevertellmetheodds subreddit has grown from 1.7 million members to a whopping 2.1 million loyal fans. The online group is home to folks who document “nearly impossible feats of achievement” and celebrate the incredible odds of doing something that requires either massive luck or huge perseverance. 

Naturally, everyone on the sub is expected to be nice and polite to one another, and bullying or harassment of any kind is not tolerated. However, something else that new members should keep in mind relates directly to the type of content shared on the subreddit. Submissions have to be about nearly impossible feats, and posts that are about deliberate tricks and stunts (i.e. requiring skill and persistence), aren’t allowed. What’s more, you shouldn’t mention the odds of something happening neither in the title of the post, nor in the comments.