42 Times People Found Some Weird Things And Asked Strangers To Help Identify Them Online

Bored Panda got in touch with the moderators of the subreddit, and they were kind enough to answer some of our questions. “Firstly, we were curious to hear how the page even came into being. The subreddit was made 14 years ago by a different user that I have no contact with. He had abandoned it, and the sub had been dead for a while.”

“About 5 years ago, I took over the subreddit using r/redditrequest, because I was interested in seeing what it was like moderating a subreddit. The sub was pretty small for a long time, until the beginning of this year when it began getting large amounts of new members,” they shared with Bored Panda.

Naturally, we also wanted to hear their take on why the page suddenly grew in size. “I'm almost certain that the big boost in members is due to the Reddit API protests that happened earlier this year. During the protest, a lot of big subreddits went private, and I guess that caused the algorithm to start recommending small subreddits like mine.”

“During the days that the protest happened, the sub started getting crazy amounts of members, like more than 10k per day for a little while, which was crazy since the sub had less than 10k members for years, and then suddenly it was getting more than that in a day. It has slowed down again now though,” they shared. 

We wanted to know what the mods thought was the main draw of the group. “I think that people are drawn to the subreddit because, for a lot of people, it's interesting to look at weird and unusual-looking objects and learn what they are. I have learned about a lot of things I would have never known about if it wasn't for this subreddit. As for me, I have never personally used the subreddit to identify an object.”

“It's been fun watching the subreddit grow over the years, and seeing all kinds of interesting items be identified by the community.” Lastly, we were also curious if there were some items that simply went unidentified. “We have a whole flair dedicated to items that haven't been identified, but the majority of items do get identified eventually. There are lots of people who see the posts, so there's a pretty high chance that someone knows what the item is.”

It’s not hard to list the benefits of a group dedicated to identifying objects quickly. Before the internet, we would have been doomed to live in a world full of mystery, now oceans of information are available at the tips of our fingers, as long as we have the energy to read. It’s also a nice jolt of positivity, that there are literally thousands of netizens out there willing to take the time to help you with a mysterious object.