This is the story that attracts people: a bride feeling excited On her wedding day; The woman’s husband insists on bringing his sister with them on honeymoon; An airline passenger who wonders whether he should Gave up his first class seat For the unknown child.
These are stories of the most questionable behavior r/AmItheAsshole. AITA, as it’s known for short, is hosted by Reddit, a one-stop clearinghouse for internet drama, comedy, and popcorn gallery judgments on the behavior of strangers. Mothership has been on a hot streak, tripling its traffic over the past year, while Google Tweaked its search algorithm To prioritize content created by real people. Since then, Reddit has grown to more than 340 million weekly unique users. Since that same period, AITA has rapidly ascended from grassroots forum to mainstream forum to ubiquitous cultural awakening.
The AMITheAsshol subreddit, as Reddit’s topic-based forums are known, boasts 20 million members ready to decide who’s right and who’s wrong in a given situation, if only to raise a hair. It has seen numerous spin-offs; Not only are advice subreddits and confessional subreddits the same yen for revelations and judgments, but subreddits are dedicated to filtering and curating all other advice and confessional subs, so readers can find only the best (or worst) stories. But AmITheAsshole’s cultural dominance doesn’t end there.
This Reddit expansion has spread beyond the platform, creating an entire internet ecosystem dedicated to reading and sharing content from advice subreddits. TikTok is full of automated accounts Read stories from AITA Monotonous against the game’s strangely hypnotic footage. Twitter and Instagram are flooded with screenshots of Reddit stories Dozens of audio podcasts And YouTubers have sprung up to retweet and comment on the latest scandalous post Ecosystems have spawned all kinds of commodities, from coffee mug from Children’s book parodies from Self Help Journal. Memes practically make themselves At this time
How do we get here? What is it about this endlessly tender story that has us so addicted?
Advice subreddits are nothing new. AITA was first created in 2013, the same year as the site’s first breakout advice forum, r/Relationships. In the years that immediately followed, that sub and its various spin-offs dominated the site. Their purpose was simple enough: ask other Redditors for advice on your relationships and other conflicts, be they small or epic. And redditors responded en masse: since it was created r/relationships has grown to more than 3.5 million subscribers.
AITA has built on that promise, streamlining the comments section from those other members into a simple, clear voting system: YTA (you’re an ass), NTA (not an ass), and ESH (everyone here sucks). (There’s another designation, NAH for “No Donkeys Here,” but it’s less commonly used. The Internet demands villains!) This structure cuts through a lot of unnecessary debate and gets to the point: Were you a donkey or not?
This is meta-gossip: gossip about idea About the idea of a person and human nature
As a cultural phenomenon, AITA’s influence has been broad: it is philosophical and Demographics The study is credited with it Helping people leave Their own toxic and unhealthy relationships. Forum dynamics have given birth to their own Obsessive checking.
To an extent, many of these are familiar. Recent gossip trends perfectly align with AITA’s rise in popularity. Yet most of this material has been about the title of knowing that the people behind these stories were real, whether they were minor celebrities involved in the fight or your neighbor’s neighbor’s best friend. AITA, however, along with other recent rising phenomena like the hit podcast General gossip and cut’s Anonymous confessionalExpand on that idea. This is meta-gossip: gossip that isn’t about a person we know, isn’t about a famous person, and often isn’t even about a real Gossip in the abstract – gossip about individuals idea About the idea of a person and human nature.
It is hardly surprising, then, that this approach easily led to numerous spin-offs in themes and variations; Every time you think you’ve reached the end of the offshoots of the advice sub and curation sub, another one pops up with a slight twist. For example, AITA is the central nervous system of the network, but it does not allow users to post content outside of what it deems to be “interpersonal conflict”; to enter Aitah — abbreviated to “What an ass here” — an important one-letter difference, sure, but that sub by doing Allows users to post a wide range of other plays. So, for example, when AITA may not allow you to seek advice later A man’s nose is brokenModerators who approve and disapprove posts on AITAH will hug you
In addition to advice subs, there are curation subreddits for all advice subs Also Exploding is the largest curation machine on-site r/BestofRedditor Updates (BORU), which pulls stories from around the site and even some advice columns off-site. Because BORU is not limited to AITA, it has a wide range of wild and incredible stories Inappropriate music during sex Forcing your workers to do period cosplay on a plantation.
These curation subs are also divided into their own areas of focus. If you want your curation to deliver a little more schadenfreude, there is r/OhNoConsequences. Want content that isn’t just written by an ass but by an actual spawn of Satan? try r/AmITheDevil.
Not all of this rapid growth can be attributed to the Google bump. A BORU moderator who approached Boring Historifan speculated to Vox that the success of these stories is less about search engine magic and more about people looking for engaging material from an easily accessible platform, “wanting content they can relate to and respond to.”
Redditor Checktheboxes, another BORU mod, was more direct, explaining that people embrace these evil stories “because they love reality TV.” They explained, “They love drama, emotion and laughter. They get all the excitement without any pressure to actually be involved in these situations. It’s just reality TV but in written form. This appetite for more is an added incentive for meta-subs, as “compiling a complete story in one place provides easy access to the whole story.” Often these stories take up multiple posts, creating entire mini-arcs across the website that begin as a single story that evolves into an ongoing narrative. Such updates may be fragmented, incomplete and scattered across forums, user profiles or comments. It can take work to even find them, much less curate them.
It’s no surprise that, increasingly, audiences for this kind of melodramatic content are turning to sources outside of Reddit itself to get it.
Dustin Storm, aka YouTuber and Podcaster Dusty ThunderSays he’s “never been a Reddit head.” It is his wife and daughter who liked the story of the site. “So when they pulled me into it, I basically became a mouthpiece or a bridge to another non-Reddit head because I’m not one.”
Storm’s family members saw more and more creators on Instagram and TikTok begin to narrate the Reddit stories they enjoyed so much. They encouraged him to start a podcast; Now Storm reads posts on his show, curated by his wife and daughter Responding authentically to stories as they read on air, Storm actively avoids Reddit advice so she doesn’t get spoiled. Formula paid; Since she started her show in 2022, her audience has topped 30,000 subscribers on YouTube and nearly a million TikTok followers.
“It’s a different kind of entertainment,” he said. “Tuning into change.” Grey’s AnatomyNow they’re jumping in and hearing some of the crazy stories going on on Reddit, and it’s just a whole different kind of content that people are latching onto. Unless there’s no shortage of drama in the world now, at least it’ll flow through Reddit.
Storm’s podcast, YouTube and TikTok are among many dedicated to surfacing this content to a wider audience, with hits like Two hot takes Podcast and its various platforms. TikTok has also spawned an endless array of weird faceless accounts dedicated to narrating Reddit stories, for example, Racing game or minecraft parkour video. Want to spice up your subreddit with food videos? You may have that, too.
“To me, whatever it is is fake”
Many off-platform content creators troll the meta forums because they have (sometimes) a sense of serialized stories and resolutions. Their appeal makes sense; Not only are Redditors churning out a bottomless well of free content for podcasters and other creators to curate, but the stories themselves inhabit that elusive space between real and fictional: just believable enough to feel believable, but augmented enough to feel like pure escapism.
Their popularity extends beyond the content creator’s milieu; Created media outlets such as People and The New York Post Reams of essays Built solely on rebuilding advice subreddit posts, now nameless, faceless gossip repackaged into generalized human interest stories. Of course, there’s no way to verify the authenticity of these Reddit stories. You might think that the increasing flow of stories that seem completely bogus — flimsy fantasy of revenge or legitimacy — would make them less appealing to readers, but the opposite effect seems to have taken hold. “We’re not too concerned about whether posts are fake or real, and it can be very difficult to tell whether a post is fake or real based on anecdotal evidence,” said BORU moderator amireallyreal. Fans seem similar.
“To me, it’s fake no matter what,” Storm said. “It doesn’t touch me. It doesn’t affect me. It doesn’t change things. So for us, it’s entertainment, number one. And number two, it’s an exercise in being able to make better decisions and relationships. And if it serves that purpose, I’ll give zero if it’s genuine or fake.”
Storm acknowledged the difficulty of knowing the truth of the stories but joked that the wildest were probably true. In fact, my anecdotal experience reading AITA or BORU usually involves being convinced that a post is fake only to encounter multiple people commenting on similar experiences; The incredulity of a post doesn’t often seem to extend beyond a person’s lived experience.
Ironically, Storm told me that Dusty Thunder subredditWhat they started as a simple way to allow their listeners to submit their own stories to the podcast, now became an example of the subreddits that the podcast was describing.
“We originally started it as a submission portal, but to engage with our community,” he said. “It has grown well beyond that. I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who have no idea who I am, but it’s taken on a life of its own now.”
It’s a weird mini-version of the asshole ecosystem: an endless ouroboros of content, both feeding and digesting more and more content.
“So some people are using the Dusty Thunder subreddit like AITA,” Storm said with a laugh.
“And they’re like, yeah, it’s a really weird name. I don’t understand it. But I like the stories.”
