u/UndeadCaesar, a moderator of r/OddlySpecific, thinks this online community is really focused on separating out the oddly-specific content from the just-general memes. "Since implementing the 'does it fit here' bot comment at the top of every post, I feel the quality of content has really improved, as usually if enough people are passionate enough about something not fitting in to open the comments and downvote the bot comment, the community is usually right," they told Bored Panda.
"I don't have to do a lot of manual moderation of the community even though it's fairly large now (Top 150 if I recall correctly), usually only stepping in to remove frequent reposts that aren't caught by the repost bot."
u/UndeadCaesar took over r/OddlySpecific after the original creator abandoned the sub and it got overrun with t-shirts saying 'This dad was born in AUGUST, loves GUNS AND BBQ, hates COMMIES, and has a CRAZY WIFE WHO BOUGHT HIM THIS SHIRT' and reposts. "I think it's a much better place now, higher quality content and a more active community," the mod said.
"I think what separates posts that go viral from ones that don't are the ones that hit that fine line of being specific enough that it's striking but about a topic general enough that anyone can relate to it."
From what u/UndeadCaesar has seen, they believe people connect to oddly specific content because it can accurately convey an emotional state with all that "extra" info and seem almost irrelevant at the same time — this duality is really entertaining.
With 676K members, r/OddlySpecific is an excellent example of just how well we humans talk to one another. A sentiment philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who studied how easily communication between people goes wrong, would probably still be wary of.
While living in Norway, he wrote a book that was published in 1931. The book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, asked a really big question: how do human beings manage to communicate ideas to one another? According to The School of Life, Wittgenstein's answer was that language triggers within us pictures of how things are in the world.
Wittgenstein thought of this while reading about a court case. During the proceedings, in order to explain with greater efficacy the details of an accident at a road junction, the court organized a visual representation of the accident using models.
In Wittgenstein's view, much like in these r/OddlySpecific posts, words enable us to make pictures of facts. Something tells me he would be a member of the subreddit were he still alive.
