Depending on how often you browse the internet, and the collection of sites you visit, you may or may not be familiar with the website Reddit. Today’s story comes from there, about one of the most wholesome subreddits you could ever hope to find: goofy cats.
Reddit is a website with a multiplicity of different views. However, nothing brings the internet together like a place to look at cats –especially cats misbehaving.
What Is Reddit?
If you aren’t familiar, it may help to conceptualize Reddit (stylized as Reddit) as different from websites you may be familiar with. Reddit is closer to a bookstore of websites than a website in and of itself. Under the banner of Reddit are themed boards for posting, known as subreddits, each with their own topics.
How Do Subreddits Work?
Reddit tends to be a hands-off site, so the subreddits don’t all have a consistent theme. Because of this, you can have subreddits dedicated for women, like r/trollxchromosomes, whose heading proclaims, alongside LGBT+ and Black Lives Matter flags, “TrollX: It’s not about the X chromosomes in your cells, it’s about the X chromosomes in your heart,” alongside subreddits which refer to women as “hamsters,” because of the supposedly circular and inferior logic of their thinking. In fact, Reddit has been in trouble for hosting subs that violate the safety of others, such as subreddits that encourage mass violence against people in relationships, and subs used to share child pornography. In June of 2020, however, Reddit banned 2,000 of these dangerous subreddits. (1, 2)
r/WhatsWrongWithYourCat
But not ever subreddit is as divisive. r/WhatsWrongWithYourCat, unlike other subreddits, has no list of rules for users to follow. It has no introduction to what the community is. Its header is “that’s just not right.” At first, it seems to be a mysterious place. Should you turn here for advice on a sick cat? (3)
Cats And Cuteness Cuteness Overload
But a scroll through the subreddit reveals a more wholesome and happy purpose. r/WhatsWrongWithYourCat is a place to post pictures of the goofy things your cats are doing, from hiding in your underwear as you use the bathroom to perching on your car mirrors.
Some are videos of cats, some are still pictures. Some cats are given names, and some are referred to as “lumps.” Some cats are posted with explanations, and some posts let the cats speak for themselves. (3)
Neverending Cats
r/WhatsWrongWithYourCat has a birthday coming up. The subreddit was started nearly three years ago–August 11th, 2015. As of August 5th, 2020, it has 208,370 members in the group. Not every member of a subreddit will post a picture. Like Facebook, a Reddit user will have a “feed” when they log in, collecting new and “hot” (or trending) posts from the subreddits they subscribe to in one central location. But there’s a lot of posts–and you can spend your time in quarantine seeing if you can see all the posts about cuddly cats that the subreddit has to offer. (3)
