On Oct. 8, 2012, someone with the screen name “txking12” posted a picture to one of the thousands of niche forums on the link aggregation site Reddit. “My room with the light off,” read the caption accompanying the photo. The image itself was all black, with no discernible details.
It was one of the most popular posts on Reddit that week.
If a blank image of a pitch-black room sounds uninteresting, that’s precisely the point: This picture was shared on a forum called “NotInteresting.” On this particular forum, observations on the mundane are shared by enthusiasts of the uninteresting. And a lot of enthusiasts at that: As of writing, more than 143,000 people have formally subscribed to a subreddit devoted to boredom. That’s equivalent of the population of Savannah, Georgia.
“There's something strangely relatable about /r/notinteresting,” its founder, who prefers to go by their screen name Sli, wrote in an email to Salon. “Everyone everywhere does and sees nondescript things every day. Why not share them with the world? It's certainly not unique in this regard.”
To give a recent example of the kind of things featured on “NotInteresting”: One popular post linked to an image with the caption “This person only has 43% battery power.” Clicking it revealed an image of a smartphone with — indeed — its battery icon at 43 percent.
“Accidentally took this picture the other day,” another post read. It was a smudged image of a finger over a smartphone camera lens. Around 3,000 people liked that post.
“The best posts, perhaps unsurprisingly, seem to be a very well executed anti-joke disguised as something like an obvious fact or an overall meaningless logical statement,” Sli told Salon. “The current top post of all time is exactly that, a map showing Europe's electricity consumption in 1507.”
Spoiler: There was no electricity consumption in Europe in 1507. The map is blank.
“It's sort of an anti-joke, but not really,” Sli continued. “It's a true statement; it's just odd.”
For the uninitiated, Reddit is a link aggregation site that routinely ranks in the top 100 most-visited websites. Essentially, it functions as host to tens of thousands of user-run and user-created forums — known as “subreddits”— which run the gamut of interests. Subreddits are generally written with “/r/” preceding them, an allusion to the way they are hyperlinked to on the site.
A subreddit’s number of subscribers is a rough indicator of its popularity. The catch-all “/r/funny,” has more than 18 million subscribers; “/r/ToyotaTacoma,” a niche forum to discuss the titular pickup, has about 10,000. Users can vote up or down on posts, which makes them more or less likely to be seen by the masses. Over time, the cream — as defined by a subreddit’s userbase — rises to the top.
Subreddits cover most major topics of interest, mirroring the Usenet forums of yore: There’s a TV subreddit, a news subreddit, and a vast number of porn subreddits. Some cater to subcultures or hobbies — for instance, a video game or a programming language. And some are basically community-specific inside jokes.
/r/notinteresting falls into the latter category — it's an extended inside joke. In an interview from 2012, Sli writes that they were inspired to start /r/notinteresting as a reaction to another subreddit called /r/MildlyInteresting — which, as you might imagine, is a source of the kind of quick factoids and images that are interesting but not particularly engaging. On an average day, /r/MildlyInteresting might feature an image of three people sitting in a row in public, coincidentally with similar features and clothes; or a cat wearing a life vest with an unknown backstory.
“I thought it would be some silly fun to extend the premise of the [mildly interesting] subreddit to its logical conclusion,” Sli wrote. As a derivative of other subreddits like /r/MildlyInteresting and /r/InterestingAsFuck, Sli told Salon he thought /r/notinteresting was “strangely niche despite not being terribly original.”
In this context, the premise of the subreddit makes a bit more sense. The big, meta in-joke of /r/NotInteresting is that it is, on some level, interesting to see how many ways there are to depict uninteresting things. Of the hundreds of daily posts to /r/NotInteresting, most are ignored and only a small few rise to the top. In other words, succeeding at being uninteresting is actually pretty hard.
I asked a user with the screen name “Empyrum,” who had a recent viral post on /r/NotInteresting, what he thought made some uninteresting posts go viral and other equally uninteresting posts stagnate. “I don't really think a good post in this sub has to be ‘bad,’” Empyrum said, “but rather [be] something interesting/funny without the content of the post itself being interesting in anyway. Which I feel is an interesting challenge.” Indeed.
Empyrum added that the /r/NotInteresting subreddit was reliant on satirizing other subreddits' content. "A lot of 'meta' posts," Empyrum said, describing it as “a parody of a [Reddit] trends.”
Hence, many of the /r/NotInteresting posts follow a common formula: Take an interesting popular post elsewhere on Reddit and copy it, yet remove whatever made it interesting in the first place. On Oct. 24, in the /r/MildlyInteresting subreddit, user iamnotchris posted an image of his friend’s wood-veneer smartphone case, which coincidentally perfectly matched the veneer of the desk that it sat atop. “My friend's phone case blends in with this 1982 school library circulation desk,” iamnotchris wrote. That post became one of Reddit’s most-popular posts of the day, with at least 111,000 users voting for it.
The next day, Empyrum went to /r/NotInteresting and posted a similar picture. “My phone case also matches my 2014 class desk but you can't see it because I'm using my phone to take this picture,” the post was titled. Clicking revealed a picture of a desk’s veneer — that was it. No phone. What was ostensibly interesting about the photo was not evident.
There’s a strange, almost inexplicable delight to the exercise at the heart of /r/NotInteresting. How do you make something uninteresting funny? The exercise is very postmodern, and also requires a very specific sense of humor. Sli once described it as a version of the /r/funny subreddit, but for "nihilists."
The mind behind /r/NotInteresting is — in their own words — a “fairly uninteresting Reddit stereotype.” “I'm in my early 30s, I'm a programmer by trade,” Sli told Salon. “Currently a frontend developer. I do love my work, but I find it hard to talk with people about it because so much of it is often either very abstract or very detail-oriented. Or maybe it's just not interesting.”
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