What The Creator Of r/AmITheAsshole Has Learned From 8 Years Of Dealing With Assholes
On today's episode of BuzzFeed Daily, we broke down the top pop culture headlines AND discussed the popular subreddit r/AmITheAsshole. You can listen below or scroll down to read more about the interview!
So let's dive right into it! Recently we talked to r/AmITheAsshole creator and moderator Marc Beaulac about the ins and outs of the wildly popular subreddit. Here's some of what we learned:
BuzzFeed Daily: You've been moderating AITA for eight years now. Can you tell us about some of the wilder submissions that have stuck with you?
Marc Beaulac: The thing that's wild that sticks with me is the expectation that people have in a forum that has 3 million users — that we know about — that they have privacy, they don't want to see it repeated elsewhere, and they don't want the story to get out there. But they do want 3 million people to talk about it right now. And to me, that concept alone is the craziest thing I see, when people send us messages saying, "I didn't realize people would see this; please delete it." And, you know, when it's out, it's out.
But I mean, [one of] the fun ones that the press started picking up [was] when we had the micropenis debate. This was maybe three years ago. Somebody wanted to know if it was valid of them to feel misled when they married a guy who did not want to have any kind of actual sex before the marriage. And then once they've finally taken vows and committed to each other, finally reveals that he has a rather severe micropenis problem, and she's just kind of legally tied up and has to deal with it now. And she wanted to know if there was any validity to her thinking that's a little unfair.
BuzzFeed Daily: What's the difference between a post that you see go really viral and the ones that maybe only get a few comments?
MB: That's hard to track. I got to say that the best posts have a little bit of a disadvantage. One example is...this stepfather had two sons and his new wife had a daughter. And he decided that it was totally reasonable of him to tell his new stepdaughter that whenever she has to use a feminine hygiene product, she has to come up with some kind of elaborate visual baffle system. So when she throws it away, his sons can't identify what it was because it makes them feel weird. So she either has to flush it, which you can't, or she has to do something crazy just to make it so they never see it.
It really did take the internet to explain to him that he is out of his mind. I think it was a little more mature as a forum by the time that one came around a few years ago... There was a whole crowd there to explain to him what mansplaining is and that he shouldn't do it. And so I guess we're a little proud of that watershed moment.
BuzzFeed Daily: An essential part of moderating a community like this is setting up rules and then sometimes removing posts that violate those rules. One thing that sticks out to me is you have this "no shitpost" rule, which says that posts "must be truthful and presented as fairly and accurately as possible." How can you tell if a poster is telling the truth or not?
SNL / GIPHY / Via giphy.com
MB: It's really hard because sometimes we really can't actually respond to every single fake report. Sometimes we actually contact the poster and we say, "Look, if this had happened, it would be in the news. Send us a link." And usually that's met with umbrage, and people don't want to prove it because it's fake, and they say it's because it would violate their privacy. I think in a lot of cases when we've gotten refusals, we know that it ended up being fake.
We certainly suspect that there's a lot of fakes because as soon as we started making waves in various news outlets, then hate groups that have a specific group they want to demonize — they love to make up stories where that person is the devil in the story, you know. And so we'll get thousands and thousands of posts about very small minority groups that far outnumber the majority of other posts. And it just doesn't make sense.
At some point, we have to admit that there are fakes out there and we're trying to get them all. But we're still looking for smoking guns. Sometimes we're a little lucky, and it'll be from an account that is today posting as a 30-year-old woman, and last week they were posting as a 14-year-old boy. That kind of stuff is handy when that happens, but it's rare.
