Want to read Reddit but don’t have the time? Our daily Reddit Digest highlights the most interesting or important discussions from around the social news site—every morning.
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“I’m thinking about going on a shooting rampage all around campus until the police come and kill me.” That was the message that greeted redditors at the University of Maryland subreddit Sunday. Thankfully some smart redditor reported the thread; the poster was promptly arrested, making national news. (/r/SubredditDrama)
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The arrest has spawned a surprising debate in the thread. Should redditors have reported the poster? Police found no weapons on him, after all. He was probably just joking. The obvious answer would seem to be “yes”—if you make a joke about mass murder, you should probably just expect to be arrested. It’s not something police take lightly. But some redditors disagree. “You guys are fucking idiots,” ordinary-people writes. “Of course it was a fucking troll. He posted it on reddit, I seriously hope the people who reported this feel guilty about his arrest for the rest of their pitiful and meaningless waste of lives.” (/r/UMD)
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There’s an eye-opening thread just underway at r/IAmA: “I have worked with sex trafficked and labor trafficked survivors. Most with domestic minor sex trafficked girls. AMAA.” The poster works mostly with girls on the East Coast of the United States. That fact alone is shocking to some redditors: “I mostly think of Eastern Europe and South East Asia when it comes to sex trafficking so its hard for me to believe that US citizens have experienced this.” They do. “Some were trafficked by their parents as young as 6 to 9,” folgaluna writes. (r/IAmA)
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This year’s winter in the U.S. Northeast was unseasonably warm. Frighteningly so, in fact. If you’re worried about the pending weather apocalypse, you should read this r/askscience thread. It’s probably one of the most concise discussions of the weirdness going on (hint: La Nina). (r/askscience)
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A double dose of weird science news at r/science today: Russian and South Korean scientists are working together to clone woolly mammoths (hopefully to use as steeds, right?—my 10-year-old self can dream), and Dutch scientists are close to growing hamburger meat in a test tube. Well, not really, in the case of the latter. “They can only grow thin strips of muscle tissue between two anchor points right now and they’re not at all close to producing ‘lab meat,’” reddit fackfack writes. “In fact he said with how under-funded they are he doubts there will be a marketable product for 50+ years. Goddamn fucking terrible science journalism :” Ouch. (/r/science)
Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments!
Image by mikebricephotography
