He knew what he was about to do was dangerous. He was summoning a dark force that, once unleashed, no man or government could contain. But he could see no other options. Zeke was going to take this problem to the hive mind at Reddit, the sprawling message board of mostly young males armed with a vast arsenal of shallow knowledge and free time, humming with a relentless desire to assuage their boredom by continually ingesting and digesting new morsels of information.

[…] Reddit was divided up into thousands of subreddits, usually by subject, each moderated by volunteers with their own often-inscrutable rules, each sub operating as a parallel reality with its own distinct culture and moral code.

[…] Reddit posts were granted or denied visibility based on votes, specifically the votes of the most bored users who sifted through the slush pile of new submissions.

[…] Reddit, the vast message board that served something like half a billion users a month. This was, to a large degree, where the internet’s unfathomable gush of data was gathered, sorted, and shaped into a satisfying narrative. Redditors half-jokingly referred to themselves as a “hive mind,” a collective of idle brainpower that could solve complex mysteries and generate new hyper-specific porn fetishes at the rate of several per minute.

[…] audiences connected like neurons forming new pathways in a brain.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, Ch. Day 1, p. 50-57