Novelty Reddit Accounts

Submission 40,461

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About

Novelty Reddit Accounts refer to profiles on the site Reddit that are dedicated to one consistent task or type of comment. These topics can include illustrations, short stories, photoshopped images and songs. Additionally, there are dozens of automated novelty accounts run by bots including ones that can mirror websites, translate captions from image macros and tip other users Bitcoins

Origin

One of the earliest novelty accounts on Reddit was GeorgeWBush^[16], a parody of former President George W. Bush created on September 17th, 2006. Though the account has not posted since January 2009, Bush's last night in office, it accrued more than 16,000 comment karma while it was active.

Spread

In February 2009, the subreddit /r/NoveltyAccounts^[3] was created for users to show off specialty accounts they've found in the comments across the site. On February 14th, 2010, A post was submitted to /r/AskReddit^[5] asking novelty accounts to post in the comments. The post accrued 1,916 upvotes, 1,291 points overall and 1,490 comments prior to being archived. That December, a second call for novelty accounts in /r/reddit.com^[6] drew 8,311 upvotes, 2,333 points overall and 3,741 comments. In January 2011, Reddit added "Best Novelty Account" to their yearly awards^[7], honoring the account Sure_Ill_Draw_That^[17] for their illustrative responses. Some users protested, as i_draw_your_comment^[20] had been doing the same thing for six months longer than Sure_Ill Draw_That. However, as of September 2013, Sure_Ill_Draw_That has inspired several parody accounts of their own including SurIllAnimateThat^[21], Sure_Ill_Sure_That^[22] and IllReallyAnimateThat.^[23]

At the end of January 2011, "novelty account" was defined on Urban Dictionary^[8] as an account created on Reddit specifically to correlate with a response to a comment and often only used once. Humor blog Blame It On The Voices^[9] shared a screenshot of an interaction between seven different novelty accounts in November 2011. In February 2012, Slacktory^[10] reported on RedditJournal^[18], an account treating Reddit as unknown wilderness, posting comments in the form of explorer logs. Soon after, this account inspired Reddit_Search_Team^[19], who responded to these comments with logs of their own, about the search for the owner of RedditJournal in the wilderness.

On July 19th, 2012, five novelty accounts including Sure_Ill_Draw_That were featured on Wired's Tumblr blog.^[12] The same day, The Daily Dot^[13] featured six novelty accounts dedicated solely to some form of art, including Shitty_Watercolour, a United Kingdom-based painter who has been painting both submissions and comments since February 15th, 2012. At the time of the post, he had gained more than 344,000 karma. On January 24th, 2013, torontoitguy submitted a post to /r/AskReddit^[4] asking how novelty accounts which are about a specific topic, brand or person know when someone is talking about them. It generated 3,914 upvotes, 1,480 points overall and 2,456 comments. That June, blogger Duncan Lock^[24] compiled statistics and other documentation about a number of the site's novelty bots. In September 2013, Mashable^[15] highlighted 13 of their favorite novelty accounts.