The Largest Subreddits on Reddit, and Which Ones Are Worth Joining

These numbers are rounded down and shift every week, so treat them as size tiers. The ranking itself changes rarely. The top of Reddit has been the same couple of dozen communities for most of the last decade.

The 20 largest subreddits

#	Subreddit	Members	Worth joining?
1	r/funny	65M+	Only if you like reposts
2	r/AskReddit	50M+	Yes
3	r/gaming	45M+	Sometimes
4	r/worldnews	40M+	For headlines
5	r/todayilearned	40M+	Yes
6	r/aww	35M+	Harmless
7	r/Music	35M+	Smaller genre subs are better
8	r/memes	35M+	No
9	r/movies	35M+	Yes, for discussion threads
10	r/Showerthoughts	30M+	Fine
11	r/science	30M+	Yes
12	r/pics	30M+	Mostly noise
13	r/Jokes	30M+	Fine
14	r/news	30M+	For headlines
15	r/space	25M+	Yes
16	r/videos	25M+	Sometimes
17	r/DIY	25M+	Yes
18	r/askscience	25M+	Yes
19	r/books	25M+	Yes
20	r/nottheonion	25M+	Fine

Why these subreddits are so big

Until 2017, new Reddit accounts were automatically subscribed to a list of “default” subreddits. Nearly every community in the top 20 was on that list at some point. Tens of millions of accounts joined them without ever choosing to, and subscriber counts don’t shrink when people stop using Reddit.

That’s why r/funny can have 65 million members and still feel like the same twelve memes on rotation. It’s also why the most useful communities on Reddit are usually much further down the list. A 200,000-member subreddit about one topic will answer your question better than any default.

The ones actually worth your time

r/AskReddit is the best of the giants, mostly because the format works at any size. Ask a broad question, get thousands of personal stories. Sort by top of the week for the good threads.

r/todayilearned requires a source for every post, which keeps it better than most link-heavy subreddits. The comments often add more than the post.

r/science has some of the strictest comment moderation on Reddit. Jokes and off-topic replies get removed fast, so what’s left is usually substantive. Expect to see a lot of “comment removed” placeholders.

r/askscience is similar but question-driven, with answers from verified panelists. Slow, careful, good.

r/DIY stays practical. Project posts need progress photos, and the comments are full of people who’ve done the same repair.

r/books and r/movies both run good scheduled discussion threads. r/movies’ official discussion posts after big releases are some of the best film conversation online.

The ones we’d skip

r/funny, r/pics and r/memes are mostly reposts and political bait now. r/worldnews and r/news are fine for scanning headlines but the comment sections are rough. None of that is a criticism of the mods, who are dealing with enormous volume. It’s just what happens at that scale.

Better: go one level down

If one of these giants covers your interest, look for the specific community underneath it. r/gaming is huge and generic; the communities in our top gaming subreddits list are where the real discussion happens. The same goes for tech, where the top IT subreddits and top programming subreddits beat r/technology for anything practical.

Business owners should skip the defaults entirely and go to the top subreddits for entrepreneurs or, for growth questions, the top marketing subreddits.

And sometimes the niche community you’re looking for exists but nobody’s running it. That’s a different opportunity, covered in how to find dead subreddits.