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View submission: What is the reddit "hive-mind"?
It's been well explained, but I'll go at in with a different approach.
TL;DR sometimes Redditors become more similar by interacting with other Redditors. When this happens really quickly and uniformly, we see the Reddit Hive Mind.
If you fired 10 rounds out of a cannon, without moving it in between, it each round would have the same likely outcomes as any other, and each round would have the same likely behaviors as a round fired in a group of 100 or 1000. The behavior of 10 groups of 10 rounds is the same as 1 group of 100, so the behavior of multiple groups of different sizes can be added with a property called 'linearity'. Linearity means that simply adding together two samples or two solutions to a question still results in a valid sample/solution.
Some systems are non-linear, like the motion of two magnetic bodies. If body A was moving forward at 1m/s, and body B was moving forward at 1m/s one meter south of A, then the motion of A without B is not the same as the motion of A with B, so their motions can't be combined linearly. Neither changed the rules they operated under, but those rules said their behavior changes based on what's nearby.
In some non-linear systems, things get more complicated. If you wanted to approximate a system in the future, based on some more- or less-detailed measurements right now, some systems require additional detail the further in the future you want to predict. For example, a double pendulum might be measured within a millimetre and make good predictions up to 5 seconds out, but require measurements down to the micrometer to make predictions a minute out. For these systems, more time needs more information.
Some linear and some non-linear systems are information-neutral on large scales (technically all of classical mechanics and Quantum Information Theory should be in this group, but *shrug*). Look up people reversing the flow of viscous fluids - the information to make the original layout still exists in the deformed layout, and vice versa.
Finally, some non-linear systems are information-negative, ie the second law of thermodynamics. If I stand a pencil up on it's tip, at some point in the future it'll fall over and stay fallen over forever, meaning I don't need to store any information at all- all futures converge to the same outcome. For the linearity of the system, we can make the same measure, The information to describe 1 liter of water poured off a mountain requires all kinds of detail about where it started and what material it landed on, but it eventually joins with more runoff and goes into a stream. The information to describe 1M liters of water is not 1M times more - it'll cut a single channel off the side of the mountain and join in a river downstream.
What does this have to do with the hivemind?
Redditors form a system which is non-linear and information-negative. We all interact with each other, losing a little bit of variety and becoming a little bit more similar. The individuals on Reddit tend to get more similar over their time here. High similarity means low information for a good approximation, so we're non-linear information-negative. When these traits show up in the extreme, we see the Reddit Hive Mind, where people's behavior converges rapidly.
There's nothing here!