u/sodypop

You can always count on Reddit to bring you something new and interesting, and maybe a little bit weird––but still related to your interests––every single day. As home to a multiplicity of interesting communities and trends, Reddit is prime space for infinite possibilities.

There’s another group of people who count on Reddit, literally. And they’ve been steadfastly counting for several years. Starting with the loneliest number 1. Today, they’re closing in on a whopping 10,000,000 (insert Dr. Evil gif here).

How r/LiveCounting got their start

It all started years ago when a few redditors over in r/counting tried to count to infinity. It turned out, however, that Reddit’s infrastructure wasn’t built for such incremental activities and some concessions needed to be made. While to this day people over in r/counting continue their march by splitting off into new threads once they reach around 1,000 comments, another segment of counters discovered they could count much faster, and higher than ever before using Reddit live threads. And thus, live counting was born.

Q&A with the Live Counting crew

This calculating crew isn’t just into counting incrementally, because obviously more variety is exponentially more fun. There is counting in even numbers, odd numbers, prime numbers, hexadecimal, binary, Roman numerals, and even counting with money and with time.

When we first encountered this odd community of redditors, we had innumerable questions but few answers. Our acute senses told us this community could function at unparalleled levels, but we needed proof they were humans and not digital beings. What factors go into a good counting session? Is there a formula? Is their whole pursuit irrational or are the numbers they count significant digits? Do all of these counters share some standard deviation from the rest of us? And most of all, does their counting know no limits?

To dig deeper into this world of counting, we caught up with a few of the most dedicated live counting contributors to get their take…

How did you come to find live counting and start contributing?

u/amazingpikachu_38: I got involved after I saw /u/qwertylool live counting and when I saw that, I decided I wanted to try live counting, so I created this account and asked to be approved, I got approved a day or two later, and noticed I got approved on September 28th 2016, when I added my first count, and I have been counting ever since. u/TOP_20: I happened upon /r/counting via a r/askreddit mention of the sub – at that time there was no way to really communicate there so I spent days trying to figure out why – why they counted day in and day out – for weeks and months on end.

But like, what the heck is the point of live counting, or is there a point?



u/LeinadSpoon: People like feeling like they’re making progress on something, and with counting the numbers just keep going up. It’s similar to the game Cookie Clicker which was popular a few years ago, but with counting you get to cooperate with other people, so it’s sort of like an MMO Cookie Clicker. u/rideride: The premise of the main thread is simple: increment the count by one, and no posting twice in a row. Side threads have also been created, such as Letter Counting and Binary Counting, but the “you cannot post twice in a row” is a universal rule. After Reddit Live was announced, /u/ralgrado created Live Counting.

What’s been one of your most memorable experiences as a part of the live counting community?



u/TOP_20: I would have a hard time picking my top 50!!!!! Thing is so many times there I have laughed until my tummy hurt. The counting itself is really just a byproduct of our group. It’s everything else that makes our group so addictive (for many) and fun…. the personal goals, the group goals, all the fun activities we come up with like the Prediction contests, quote quizzes and so on. u/dominodan123: It’s probably nostalgia speaking, if I’m allowed to have that after only two years, but my favorite memory from LC was probably the feeling I got a few weeks after the revival when I was starting to realize that this was something that was actually going to stick around. We went from doing 1-3 ks per day (1000 counts per k) to all of a sudden 6+ k per day consistently. Our first stats were being created and our community was birthed. It was really exciting at the time to be part of something like this with the small niche group I was quickly becoming great friends with. u/amazingpikachu_38: One of my many memorable experiences in live counting was when I hit 1,000,000 counts in mid February 2018, just a few days more than 500 days after I joined.

The Live Counting community has their own vernacular like GETS and Assists. What do these mean to the casual observer?

u/LeinadSpoon: We have a ton of terminology, including acronyms like whtma (“We have too many acronyms”). We have a few terms to refer to certain numbers: get – a number that ends in 000. Gets are automatically captured by a bot and listed on the sidebar for a time. At LC, we celebrate gets a lot less than at /r/counting because we have so many of them, but we do still track them and it’s especially nice for new people to see their name on the sidebar after doing their first run.

assist – The number right before the get, ending in 999. Some counters, like /u/amazingpikachu_38 , like assists more than gets. He has over 3,000 assists, which I’m pretty sure is the most anyone has of any special number we track.

drome – Short for “palindrome”. These are numbers that are the same forwards and backwards, like 9,012,109. Currently, there is one drome every thousand counts, but once we hit 10M they’ll only be once every 10k, so these last few common ones are in higher demand than usual.

The live counting thread has a lot of automation behind it. Things like the “Hall of Counters” in the sidebar, and a bot that strikes out counts that aren’t in numerical order. Who created these integrations and how do they work?

u/rideride: Perhaps the greatest robots in Live Counting history were created by /u/rschaosid. His most useful bot is /u/count_better, which automatically strikes invalid counts. He also created /u/live_mentions, which sends a message to people if they are mentioned in the thread. There are tons of people who have created and updated stats, including /u/co3_carbonate, /u/piyushsharma301, /u/howtoaddict, /u/IvanLudvig, /u/LeinadSpoon, and /u/artbn. JSONs of every single count are available, allowing statistics to be created through python, Java, etc. Aside from stats, we also have two extensions. “Live Counting Extension,” or LCE, was created by /u/co3_carbonateand is one of the greatest parts of Live Counting. All of our active members have Live Counting Extension. LCE provides behind-the-scenes features to make Live Counting faster, but also includes custom username colors. I currently run LCE. We also make special usernames for whoever counts the most in an 100k range. In May 2017, I created the “Reply Times Extension,” an extension that adds reply times to counts, as well as colors them in 100ms intervals to quickly see how fast the count was. I also let active members get a special reply time number. If users get their own reply time, they get a rainbow username! This extension taught me all that I know about javascript. I had little to no programming experience before making the extension, but now it’s a hobby.

Is there an endgame? What are your hopes for the future of live counting?

u/rideride: Collectively, however, I don’t see an end to counting. For the future, I hope that we get more active contributors, as our community has gotten to know each other pretty well. Ideally, there would be enough people to always have someone to talk to, but small enough where we’d all know each other pretty well. u/LeinadSpoon: We’ll stop the moment we get to infinity. One of the cool things about live counting is that the journey is more important than the destination. Big milestones like 10M are cool, and I imagine the pace we’ve had these past couple of months will slow off a bit once we get there, but once we’ve gotten to 10M we’ll turn our focus to other goals. dominodan123: My hopes for our future is really just that we continue to exist as an active community, because I truly to love it. It’s always great when we get new members because their excitement to rank up in the stats and learn about our community is infectious.

Thank you, r/LiveCounting, for keeping things interesting. By the way, for those of you who love puns and math, the first person to tally up the number of puns in this post and reply in r/blog with the correct count will be on the receiving end of some Reddit Premium!