About

/r/MapPorn, or Map Porn, is a subreddit on Reddit devoted to interesting maps and geography nuances. The subreddit has strict guidelines for map-related content and is generally un-ironic. It provides interesting maps to its more than a million members, such as interesting statistics and data relevant to people's understanding of the world, history and culture. Although it is a more serious subreddit, its most notable and viral content tends to lean towards meta.

History

Similar to the trend of food porn, "map porn" is an internet slang term that is used to describe anything map-related that is pleasing or particularly interesting to look at. The term "map porn" precedes the subreddit itself and was likely an offshoot of the food porn trend that appeared online during the late 2000s.^[5]

The subreddit was created on May 21st, 2011, and as of August 2021, it has roughly 1.5 million members (example post shown below).^[1] On April 15th, 2013, a second, more ironic circlejerk subreddit was created based on /r/MapPorn called, /r/MapPornCircleJerk.^[2] This subreddit hosts map-related meme content that would not make it onto the more serious and scholarly /r/MapPorn. This subreddit has roughly 74,800 members as of August 2021.

Highlights

As previously stated, /r/MapPorn is generally for more serious map content, providing maps and geography with interesting and accurate statistics and data. That being said, its most upvoted highlights are generally more meta.

On December 6th, 2018, Redditor^[3] john3806 posted a map depicting the territories of various wolf packs, receiving over 50,900 upvotes and 1,000 comments in six months (seen below, left). On August 5th, 2019, Redditor^[4] I_Am-Awesome posted a meta example to the subreddit, receiving over 82,800 upvotes and 650 comments in six months, becoming the second-most upvoted map on the subreddit (seen below, right).

Search Interest

External References