But out on the fringes of Reddit, you’ll find strange and unusual subreddits that aren’t like the rest. From high-concept text-only subreddits to meme-style image-only subreddits with bizarre slants, here are some of the weirdest communities you might want to check out. The kinds of subreddits we’re looking at: Subreddits that have strange, unusual, or even surreal concepts. They might be funny, perplexing, or just plain weird, and yet they’re somehow popular. The kinds of subreddits we’re NOT looking at: Subreddits that are satirical circlejerks of other subreddits, subreddits that are meta-humor for other subreddits, or subreddits that are NSFW.
20. r/NotInteresting
r/NotInteresting is an anti-humor subreddit where users post mundane images and videos that arent interesting in the slightest. It’s a weird concept that shouldn’t be anywhere near as popular as it is. The humor of r/NotInteresting is how it subverts the nature of Reddit and social media culture, which constantly pushes bite-sized bits of interesting media in our faces every second of the day.
19. r/Copypasta
In web culture, a “copypasta” is a direct copy-and-paste of older—and often infamous—posts from forums and social media that have basically become memes due to how ridiculously amusing they are. r/Copypasta is a subreddit where users can post new copypasta-worthy blocks of text, essentially acting as an archive of copypasta texts. These can spread like wildfire, becoming inside jokes to those in the know.
18. r/Pareidolia
Have you ever seen a carrot that grew in a weird way and ended up shaped like a person or animal? Or maybe you’ve seen faces in everyday objects like power outlets? It’s called pareidolia—the tendency to see meaningful patterns in the mundane and ambiguous. r/Pareidolia is a place where users can share the various pareidolia that they encounter. The weirdness of this subreddit is more in the phenomenon than the subreddit itself, and you’ll see surprised at all the different objects you see in otherwise boring images.
17. r/FormerPizzaHuts
Pizza Hut locations have always stuck out like a sore thumb with their unique and iconic architectural design: the famous hut roof. But when a Pizza Hut closes down and a new business takes over, they don’t always have the funds to remodel—thus, the Former Pizza Hut is born. r/FormerPizzaHuts is a weirdly niche subreddit where users share the Former Pizza Huts that they see in the wild. These are businesses that were clearly once Pizza Huts but are no longer. You’ve probably seen a bunch of these yourself, so go ahead and share them!
16. r/DeepIntoYouTube
More than 720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day. Not all of those videos are the kind of “YouTube content” you think of—a lot of it is weird, surreal, shocking, and even creepy. r/DeepIntoYouTube is a subreddit where people share these kinds of abnormal videos that only exist in the deepest, darkest corners of YouTube. You won’t just wonder why these videos were uploaded in the first place, but how these people even stumbled across them!
15. r/ImSorryJon
r/ImSorryJon is one of the first truly weird subreddits you’re likely to come across on Reddit. Remember the Garfield comics? The one with the lazy-yet-adorable orange cat who loves lasagna? This subreddit features original artwork where people turn him into his “true form,” which is often creepy and horrific as he threatens Jon Arbuckle’s life.
14. r/Hmmm
r/Hmmm is little more than a collection of images that make you go “Hmmm…” They’re absurd, they don’t make sense, they take time to process what’s even going on in them. You can’t help but look at them because they’re just so anomalous. As the subreddit got more popular, the quality started going downhill with images that were staged or photoshopped. Still, every so often there’s a truly weird image that evokes nothing more than maximum perplexion.
13. r/Backrooms
If you’ve played video games, there may have been times when you glitched into unfinished areas that weren’t meant to be accessible. They can often be eerie due to their uncanny designs. Even creepier is that there are real-world places that feel like unfinished areas, and they’re known as “backrooms.” r/Backrooms is an image-sharing community for places that evoke this strange feeling.
12. r/LiminalSpace
Similar to r/Backrooms, r/LiminalSpace is an image-sharing community for uncanny images that evoke a sense of “liminal space”—the time between “what was” and “what’s next,” where you feel like you’re stuck in time and in between worlds. In a sense, r/Backrooms is a subgenre of r/LiminalSpace. There’s a much greater variety of bizarro imagery here, making it that much weirder.
11. r/BoneHurtingJuice
r/BoneHurtingJuice is another one of those strange anti-humor subreddits, but deserves special mention for its creativity and the fact that it was one of the first ones to really lean into anti-humor. It pokes fun at today’s meme-centric web culture by editing common meme templates and turning them into overly-literal depictions of what’s shown in the image. To see an example, check out the original “bone hurting juice” comic that sparked the trend.
10. r/DisneyVacation
If you’ve ever searched Google for how to do something, you’ve probably come across the wikiHow site. The site’s most distinctive feature is how every how-to is supplemented with hand-drawn images in the characteristic wikiHow style. r/DisneyVacation is where users find the weirdest wikiHow illustrations and caption them with literal or nonsensical “How to…” titles that take the images completely out of context. Where did the subreddit’s name come from? It was born in response to another Reddit thread that featured one of the worst images from wikiHow on an article titled “How to Plan a Disney Vacation.”
9. r/BootTooBig
r/BootTooBig is the one true “roses are red” subreddit, where users share images that contain text and caption them with titles that set up a “roses are red” poem. The text in the image is the punchline. The best posts in this subreddit are ones that pay careful attention to both rhyme and meter. While there are many poor-quality submissions, it’s a joy to run into the occasional gem. The subreddit’s name comes from this original post.
8. r/Slavs_Squatting
Slavs are an Eastern European and Eurasian people group who have developed a reputation for two things: wearing Adidas-branded attire and casually squatting down with their heels on the ground. r/Slavs_Squatting is an image-sharing community for photos that play into this stereotype. The only thing weirder than the concept of this subreddit is how true the stereotype appears to be.
7. r/BreadStapledToTrees
Did you know there’s an entire community of Redditors who go around stapling slices of bread to trees, then take photos of their deed to be shared with other bread-staplers? It doesn’t make any sense, and yet r/BreadStapledToTrees is alive and active. People continue to staple their bread to trees, and every day new members join in on the fun. Nobody really knows how this trend started, but the prevailing theory is that someone first did it as a play on bread being a “staple” food. From there, it exploded and became its own thing.
6. r/BirdsArentReal
r/BirdsArentReal posits that all birds in the US have been replaced by government drones that are used to spy on the public. The subreddit itself is basically a free-for-all zone for anything and everything related to birds, except captioned with titles that play into the whole “birds aren’t real” conspiracy angle. It’s obviously a joke, but what’s really worrying is that there’s a growing number of participants who actually believe birds aren’t real. That itself is what makes this subreddit one of the weirdest ones.
5. r/BirdsWithArms
Another bird-related subreddit, except this time we’re looking at a community who loves photoshopping arms onto birds. r/BirdsWithArms is a creative place for photos and drawings of birds that have had their wings replaced with human arms. It’s funny in the most ridiculous way, and the community has grown to over 1 million strong. Out of all the non-NSFW photoshop-based subreddits out there, r/BirdsWithArms is certainly up there as one of the weirdest.
4. r/SubSimulatorGPT2
OK, I know I said I wouldn’t be including any subreddits that are based on meta-humor for other subreddits, but r/SubSimulatorGPT2 deserves a spot here because it’s just so unlike any other existing community. If you’ve heard of r/SubredditSimulator, this one is the spiritual successor to that. Based on user behavioral patterns of many different subreddits, r/SubSimulatorGPT2 creates entire threads from scratch—including comments—that mimic the different subreddits. r/SubredditSimulator was much simpler as it used Markov chains to generate its simulated threads, while r/SubSimulatorGPT2 uses OpenAI’s GPT2 language model. Every single thread and comment is bot-generated, and regular users can only upvote/downvote.
3. r/LowBatterySounds
Many battery-operated devices, gadgets, and toys produce sounds as part of regular use. From gimmicky birthday cards to dolls that speak when squeezed, there are many examples out there. And the weirdest thing about these items? When their batteries are low on juice, the sounds start to get warped—and the less juice remaining in the batteries, the more distorted the sounds can get. r/LowBatterySounds is a strange, niche subreddit where people post videos of the various low-battery devices they encounter.
2. r/ItemShop
r/ItemShop is a fun but weird subreddit where out-of-context images and videos are captioned as items from an RPG, often with stats that reflect the item in the image or video. For example, one image that shows a knife hidden in French bread (to be snuck past police) is captioned as a “Baguette Knife” that grants +100 Stealth and +200 Taste. It’s a silly subreddit that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and the weirdness is part of its appeal.
1. r/NoSneeze
Seven years ago, one Redditor posed an unusual thought experiment: The r/NoSneeze subreddit was born from that question. It’s a community where people can record their sneezes, so that if humanity ever does stop sneezing en masse, we’ll be able to know. Obviously, it’s nonsense. Humanity won’t ever stop sneezing, and recording our sneezes is totally unnecessary. But it’s harmless fun and certainly ones of the weirdest subreddit concepts out there. Read next: The biggest subreddits still worth subscribing to
