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r/nosleep is a subreddit where users post short horror stories. Key tenets of the community include that stories posted on the subreddit must be believable and that users must pretend that the stories are true. One of the most well-known subreddits, r/nosleep has more than seventeen million members and is within the top fifty most popular subreddits. It has spawned an eponymous podcast called The NoSleep Podcast and multiple published novels.

Content and rules[edit]

Stories must follow a threshold of believability. Members must pretend that the stories are true in comments. The moderators of r/nosleep, led by Christine Druga (u/cmd102), review if stories meet the rules.[1][2]

History[edit]

r/nosleep was created in March 2010.[3]

From March 19 to March 21 in 2018, an event called "The Purge" was held on r/nosleep, in which the posting rules of the subreddit were temporarily suspended.[4]

r/nosleep has faced problems with stolen content on the internet, particularly people who upload narrations of short stories without crediting or requesting permission from the original author. Moderators have created three other subreddits — r/NosleepWritersGuild, r/SleeplessWatchdogs, and r/YTNarratorsGuild — to educate narrators on copyright law and how to use content from r/nosleep as well as to report stolen content on the internet and alert affected authors.[5] In February 2020, r/nosleep began a weeklong blackout that restricted access to the subreddit in protest of stolen content.[5][6]

Impact[edit]

Authors on r/nosleep have adapted their stories into published novels, such as Dathan Auerbach's Penpal (2012), which he originally published on the subreddit in September 2011, and the Tales from the Gas Station series by Jack Townsend.[7] In 2016, Amblin Partners acquired the rights to "The Spire In The Woods", a ten-part story posted on the subreddit.[3][8] In 2018, Ryan Reynolds was attached as a producer to an adaptation of an r/nosleep story.[9] In 2020, Netflix purchased the rights to Matt Query's six-part series "My Wife and I Bought a Ranch."[10] In 2022, Sony's 3000 Pictures purchased the rights to Nick Moorefox's story "My Mother-in-law was poisoning me then I found out why" with Jessica Knoll attached to adapt.[11]

In 2014, a story about a mysterious, fictitious epidemic in the small town of Mammoth, Arizona was published on r/nosleep. As the story spread online, many people began to believe that the story was true. Residents and the police department were bombarded with calls from people who believed the hoax, and multiple news outlets compared it to the hysteria which followed after listeners were convinced that a 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast was true.[12][13]

In 2017, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab created Shelley, a deep-learning artificial intelligence trained from a corpus of thousands of r/nosleep stories which creates its own horror stories.[14]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Selk, Avi (October 31, 2019). "Inside the horror website that's freaking out millions of people". The Washington Post. Retrieved October 31, 2022.
  2. ^ "cmd102 (u/cmd102) - Reddit". reddit. Retrieved 2022-10-31.
  3. ^ a b Dodgson, Lindsay (June 26, 2020). "Reddit's r/NoSleep is a special 'horror bubble' for internet writers that has born book deals and even a Steven Spielberg adaptation". Insider. Retrieved October 31, 2022.
  4. ^ cmd102 (2018-03-16). "**Special Announcement from the Mods**". r/NoSleepOOC. Retrieved 2022-10-31.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  5. ^ a b Hale, James (February 26, 2020). "Horror Subreddit r/nosleep Goes Dark To Protest YouTubers Stealing Their Stories". Tubefilter. Retrieved October 31, 2022.
  6. ^ Peters, Jay (Feb 28, 2020). "Horror story subreddit goes dark to protest Youtubers ripping off writers". The Verge. Illustrated by Castro, Alex. Retrieved October 31, 2022.
  7. ^ "Tales from the Gas Station Wiki". tales-from-the-gas-station.fandom.com. Retrieved 2022-10-31.
  8. ^ Eng, Jess (July 20, 2022). "How 'Old Country' went from a Reddit story to a novel and Netflix deal". The Washington Post. Retrieved October 31, 2022.
  9. ^ McNary, Dave (December 5, 2018). "Ryan Reynolds to Produce Horror Story 'The Patient Who Nearly Drove Me Out of Medicine' (EXCLUSIVE)". Variety. Retrieved October 31, 2022.
  10. ^ Ankers, Adele (2020-07-27). "Netflix Just Bought the Rights to an r/Nosleep Horror Story". IGN Nordic. Retrieved 2022-11-02.
  11. ^ Grobar, Matt (2022-05-03). "Sony's 3000 Pictures Acquires Film Rights To 'I Think My Mother-In-Law Is Trying To Kill Me'; Jessica Knoll To Adapt Reddit Short Story & Executive Produce". Deadline. Retrieved 2022-11-02.
  12. ^ Dean, Michelle (October 27, 2015). "The internet's scariest place: NoSleep, Reddit's band of horror enthusiasts". The Guardian. Retrieved October 31, 2022.
  13. ^ Van Velzer, Ryan (November 12, 2014). "Small Arizona town target of 'War of Worlds' Web hoax". USA Today. Retrieved October 31, 2022.
  14. ^ MIT Media Lab (October 27, 2017). "Can artificial intelligence learn to scare us?". MIT News. Retrieved November 5, 2022.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:R/nosleep