In /r/changemyview/, thousands of redditors gather to carry on an explicitly, rigorously civil discourse about the subjects that matter most to them: a submitter puts forward views on subjects ranging from the correct interpretation of old movies to the suitability of Donald Trump for president, and then invites the forum to present arguments to change their mind, awarding a Δ (delta) symbol to people whose arguments cause a shift in their beliefs. Read the rest

A paper published by Notre Dame researchers in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems reveals that Reddit users vote on things before reading the article.

73 percent of posts on Reddit are voted on by users that haven’t actually clicked through to view the content being rated. This is according to a newly released dataset consisting of all Reddit activity of 309 site users for a one year period. In the process, the researchers identified signs of “cognitive fatigue” in Reddit users most likely to vote on content. Online aggregation is then somewhat a function of mental exhaustion.

As of 2017, reddit sees 234 million unique monthly users, according to Alexa. It’s the fourth most trafficked website in the United States. In light of that, a 309 user sample seems pretty small. But it’s small because the Notre Dame dataset offers something a bit different than most other reddit datasets. Rather than relying on reddit’s own data collection methods (via its API or by crawling the website with software), Notre Dame computer science researcher Tim Weninger and colleagues were able to come up with their own independent data collection architecture, thus allowing them to ask different sorts of questions.

Redditor Endeavy created these Halloween-themed skull hotpockets, augmented by dribbles of red, oozing sauce; they used these cake pans to mold the crusts. Read the rest

Reddit embarked on a purge of violence-advocating content today, the targets generally being Nazis and their friends, but also at least one animal abuse subreddit and one targeting white people.

The newly banned and removed pages include r/NationalSocialism, r/Nazi, r/whitesarecriminals and r/far_right.

Reddit's new policy says: "Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people."

Ever since I read Michael Pollan's advice to avoid any food whose packaging makes any nutritional claims, I've been a happy man -- but never so much so as I realize that this rule means I would never fall prey to the latest shitty scam from the Quaker oats people. Read the rest

r/The_Donald, before: "Fuck the travel ban, forced deportation. 1 week or 10 years in jail. GTFO." After: "Antifa? This smells like a false flag. Research this." Read the rest

Right-wing clones of mainstream social media are ten-a-penny. But now the left's getting in on the action, too. Behold Raddle, a "leftist alternative to Reddit" founded after some intra-left drama spiralled out of control (plus ca change) and ended with site-wide bans. [via Metafilter] Read the rest

Papa-to-be and Serena Williams' sweetie Alexis Ohanian shared his favorite post from Reddit, the site he co-founded, on Tuesday night's Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Nope, it's not the one that shows the dog that looks like William H. Macy (though that's impressive).

It's a heartwarming one about a man whose vehicle broke down and, well, watch the clip.

Previously: Reddit co-founder breaks down net neutrality for Snoop Dogg Read the rest

This beautiful photograph was shared by Redditor iam4real. Read the rest

In this new video, John Green highlights his favorite quirky corners of Reddit, including Children Falling Over, Better Every Loop, Nature Is Fucking Lit, and the utterly delightful Birds With Arms:

[Photo submitted by Revenginator239]

Feel free to highlight your favorite joyful subreddits in the comments. Read the rest

A GOP lawmaker swears he's not the notorious internet misogynist who said this... Read the rest

Students of Avondale High School in the Detroit neighborhood of Auburn, MI are currently sitting in in the hallways of their school to protest the announcement that 6 of their teachers were to be laid off. Read the rest

Jeromie Whalen is a technology teacher at Northampton High School who recently took over as the school yearbook advisor (one of the many cool projects he's done at his school); when he stepped into the role, he discovered with mounting horror that the school's yearbook contractor, the field-dominating Jostens Yearbook, was "literally a scam." Read the rest

Redditors' convention of tagging their sarcastic remarks is a dream come true for machine learning researchers hoping to teach computers to recognize and/or generate sarcasm. Read the rest

Over April Fool's weekend, Reddit introduced r/place, a blank canvas where users could add pixels of any color. It quickly emerged into an astonishing piece of collaborative digital art with several hard-fought battles to keep and erase certain elements. Read the rest

Song: Bag Raiders, 'Shooting Stars.' One Hour Version is here, and below. It's making me happy. Read the rest

R U A Dick is a single-serving website that performs sentiment analysis on your (or anyone's) Reddit account history. I was deemed "slightly positive." Here is my most positive sentence on Reddit.

And here is my most negative one.

The script can also be run on Subreddits and the creator maintains a leaderboard of the nicest ones. I Took A Picture has the highest total score; other notably positive subs include Cosplay, Penmanship and Tattoos. [via Reddit.]

Every Monday I extract the top comments from the top posts of some of the most popular subreddits through the Reddit API. Each comment gets parsed into sentences and analyzed using the NLTK Sentiment Analyzer Vader Module which scores them based on how positive, negative, and neutral they are. Subreddits are ranked from most positive to least positive in the table below.