‘What Could Go Wrong’: 40 Times People Immediately Regretted Their Poor Life Choices

Bored Panda reached out to redditor u/Peanutbuttered, who is the creator of the internet-famous subreddit r/whatcouldgowrong, to find out more about their community. The redditor told us that after their friends introduced them to Reddit many years ago, they loved the concept of different subreddit communities allowing you to customize the content you wanted to see.

“I sat there thinking about ideas for a subreddit—at this time, it had seemed like every category had been thought of already. I thought it would be funny to make a content community where the only things submitted were just gifs of bad ideas with unfavorable outcomes.” u/Peanutbuttered clicked the button to make it go public, and the rest is history.

The community now has 4.0m members and gets submissions every day, but the creator of r/whatcouldgowrong said that it’s not up to them to approve the posts. “Reddit works by community voting, but we along with our content robots remove anything that doesn’t meet the rules,” they explained.

As r/whatcouldgowrong began to evolve, Reddit included it in a collection of popular subreddits where they “revamped the idea behind 'default communities,'” explained the creator. They said that since then, r/whatcouldgowrong “started to show up on the home page more often, which brought in more people.”

“The content is all pretty much the same, but the people participating in the discussion section of each post is no longer WCGW subscribers, but a combination of subscribers and general people from the rest of Reddit,” explained u/Peanutbuttered.

The creator of the community also said that their favorite submission is the one where “a guy is rolling down a hill in a shopping cart, and what happens is about what you’d expect. This is my favorite post because it inspired me to create the page.”

Even though u/Peanutbuttered is aware that their subreddit is for quick entertainment, it still provides a lesson to learn. “My hope is that people who are thinking of attempting a stupid stunt will rethink their decision or maybe recall a post they saw on /r/whatcouldgowrong. Then they’ll think, 'maybe I should not do this,'” the redditor said.

In fact, u/Peanutbuttered concluded that in a perfect world, r/whatcouldgowrong wouldn’t exist “because people would know what is smart to attempt and what isn’t.” But since that’s not the case, at least, they hope the subreddit can help to prevent an injury or save a life.