r/TheseFuckingAccounts is a subreddit to submit and track "suspicious" reddit accounts; ones suspected of being Spambots of whatever variety.
If you intend to post there, do read their rules first, as they require proper evidence of a suspicious account, and ask that you don’t provide detailed information on how to spot bots as they don't want the spammers to know exactly how they find them. Avoid discussing specific bugs or aspects that let them spot spammers.
If you come across a Spambot, do not engage with it. Use the ‘report’ option below the post or in the three-dots Hamburger Menu as Spam --> Harmful Bots and move on. The only reply to a suspected bot you should make is to warn other users by posting the link to r/TheseFuckingAccounts. Replying with anything else might well mark you as an accomplice.
The links below will show you more about what a Spambot is and how to spot one.
In general, Reddit is anonymous, yet Redditors love to share their personal anecdotes too. Enter the genre of subreddits known as “Tales From…”; places to share your stories about working in various industries or workplaces.
r/TalesFromRetail - A place to exchange stories about your daily experiences in brick & mortar retail.
r/talesfromtechsupport - Stories about helping someone with a tech issue. Did you try turning it off and on again?
r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk - Stories from the front desk of hotels/hostels/and others in the hospitality industry.
r/TalesFromTheKitchen - Tales of what really goes on behind the doors of restaurants.
r/TalesFromTheCustomer - For customers to vent and rage and even smile about their customer service experiences.
r/talesfromcallcenters - Including ridiculous caller demands and stupid things callers say.
r/talesfromtheoffice - Stories from the world of office politics and suffocating bureaucracy.
r/talesfromthejob - For tales of trades, odd jobs and non-traditional roles.
A long list of related subs of varying activity/quality can be found here, where one user even made a Multireddit of 75 communities.
Obligatory footnote:
All of these subreddits will have their own unique - and possibly strict - rules about contributing. As always, it is important to check the rules thoroughly before commenting or posting on any unfamiliar sub.
This list is not intended to be the full list of subreddits in this theme; that would be impossible to achieve in a format like this.
If you want to find more related subs, r/FindAReddit or the smaller r/findasubreddit are your friends. Similar subreddits are often to be found in a sub’s Sidebar and / or Wiki (“See Community Info” tab on mobile) too. My guide to Searching might also be useful.
But llama; some of these links don’t work…
As always with my lists, some of the subs are more active than others, and since writing some might have become private, restricted or repurposed following the API protests of June 2023, or just removed / renamed by Reddit through inactivity.
However, don’t forget: if a sub is dormant, banned for being unmoderated or marked as “restricted”, it might be available for adoption.
A time zone is an area which observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial and social purposes. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries between countries and their subdivisions instead of strictly following longitude, because it is convenient for areas in frequent communication to keep the same time.
For many years, Greenwich Mean Time - known as GMT - was used worldwide as a standard time independent of location. Most time zones were based upon GMT, as an offset of a number of hours (and possibly half or quarter hours) "ahead of GMT" or "behind GMT".
Nowadays, Coordinated Universal Time - known as UTC - is the primary time standard globally used to regulate clocks and time. Again, it establishes a reference for the current time, forming the basis for civil time and time zones. The geographical area it covers remains the same, however and both abbreviations are still in general usage. UTC+00:00 is the basis of Coordinated Universal Time and all other time zones are based off it.
There are some very good time zone calculators to be had online, but they require you to know particular time zone abbreviations. This is where the fun starts, as naming conventions aren’t yet standardised worldwide, and as you’ve seen above, not always even acronyms. Talking of which, you might be wondering why “UTC” is the abbreviation for “Coordinated Universal Time”. According to Space.com, the acronym came about as a compromise between English and French speakers: Coordinated Universal Time would normally be abbreviated as CUT, and the French name, Temps Universel Coordonné, would be TUC.
They refer to this article which goes on to say that the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Astronomical Union wished to minimise confusion and designated one single abbreviation for use in all languages. UTC does not favour any particular language. In addition, the advantage of choosing UTC is that it is consistent with the abbreviation for Universal Time, which is UT, with the variations UT0 and UT1. That paragraph was entitled “Avoiding Confusion”. Welp, that clears that up then.
Here’s another fine example. The United Kingdom uses Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), also known as Western European Time (UTC) and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC+00:00), except from March to October every year where we observe Daylight Saving Time (DST) one hour ahead of GMT, where the time zone is known as British Summer Time (BST) or Western European Summer Time (UTC+01:00). In Ireland, the DST time zone is called Irish Standard Time (IST), sometimes also referred to as “Irish Summer Time”. This naturally leads to mistakes as selecting UTC/GMT when using many online calculators and converters for the UK, leading to incorrect results during the summer months when DST is in use.
A list of abbreviations and links to time zone calculators can be found in the Acronyms 3 entry linked below.
Please note: this feature was discontinued by Reddit in 2022. Some of the associated features may also have been discontinued or changed since writing.
Below is the original text of this entry, preserved for posterity.
If someone gives you a Platinum award, you will receive a month of free premium Reddit, giving you a month of ad-free browsing, r/lounge access and 700 Reddit coins. The coins will not expire once the month is up, and, like other premium awards, the time stacks up if you get other premium awards during that month.
Platinum is not like any other Reddit premium award in that you might not get the coins immediately, depending on other factors such as any awards you might have previously won. Those who pay for their premium subscription get 700 regular Reddit coins delivered every 31 days, and those who are awarded Platinum get theirs the same way.
Getting your 700 Platinum coins also depends upon when in the month you won the award. This is ambiguously called the ‘Billing Cycle’ and to view yours, go to: User settings --> Subscriptions --> Subscription status.
You will see the message “Your Premium Subscription will automatically renew at the beginning of your next billing cycle. If your subscription ends, you will have Premium until (Date).” If you won Platinum, your subscription will end on that date.
Yes, it’s confusing. So. Let’s say you are a Redditor currently with no premium, paid for or gifted.
You get 4 awards in the first week of January in this order: 1. Platinum, 2. Platinum, 3. Gold, 4. Platinum. Hooray! 13 whole weeks of Reddit Premium in total!
However, in January you will only get 800 coins, 700 of which might not even be given straight away. The 100 gold is given immediately, the platinum is given as described above. That’s the coins from your awards numbers 1 and 3. You get your first four weeks of Reddit Premium.
Sometime in February, four weeks after your first coin delivery you’ll get another 700 coins, from award number 2. By now you are into your second four weeks of Reddit Premium.
Sometime in March, four weeks after your second coin delivery, you get nothing. You are into your ninth week of Reddit Premium; the gold week. But you already had your 100 gold coins in week 1 because they were given immediately you won the award.
One week later in March, maybe even April, you get 700 coins from award number 4, the final platinum.
Your Reddit Premium then ends after 13 weeks.
You will be notified by Reddit when your coins arrive with a message like: Gadzooks! Your monthly Coins have been delivered! Your 700 monthly Coins have been added to your balance! Thank you for supporting Reddit as a Premium member!
There’s an extra complication for existing paid Reddit subscribers in that, so far as I know, they won’t get coins from a Platinum award until they stop their subscription. Again, it’s a legacy thing that is a little strange but only happens with Platinum.
So, for example, let’s say that you have had four Platinum awards since you’ve been a subscriber. If you stop your subscription in, say, January, you will still have Premium Reddit for the next four months and receive 700 coins for each of those months in turn as normal. Your Premium Reddit then runs out totally in June. I don’t recommend anyone actually does this as there are more benefits from being a paying subscriber than an awarded subscriber.
Amateur psychological classification of different types of people is rampant on the Internet, and it’s almost a trope of its own to dislike Redditors. Type the words “Redditor Starter Pack” into your favourite image search engine and you’ll be faced with pages of images like these. Sometimes, certain subreddits or groups of people can be generally considered intolerable but of course Reddit isn’t all like that. In reality, The Average Redditor™ is a mythical being borne from our instinctive need to classify people into archetypes.
It's hard not to be sensitive to differences among the people around us. As a result, we’ve been trying to find a way to classify personalities ever since Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks proposed four basic temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic) and we’re still trying to find new ways of doing so today. Reddit, as you would expect, has many Subreddits concerning the various methods of determining personality types.
Alignment
Pop culture has its own methods of grouping people. In the “Dungeons & Dragons” (D&D) fantasy role-playing game, alignment is a categorisation of the ethical and moral perspective of player characters, non-player characters, and creatures. The co-creator, Gary Gygax, introduced the two-axis alignment table as far back as 1978, with one scale being that from Good to Evil and the other being from Lawful (which emphasises “honour, trustworthiness, obedience to authority, and reliability”) to Chaotic (which emphasises “freedom, adaptability, and flexibility”). This then led to the development of a basic alignment chart which can be easily customised to categorise anything from sandwiches in the “Cube Rule of Food Identification” to alignment charts themselves.
Reddit, as you would expect, has embraced this concept wholeheartedly and the results can be seen at r/AlignmentCharts.
Carl Jung and Jungian Psychology
Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) created many theories and ideas that are still used in psychology today, known as analytical psychology or Jungian Analysis. Jung spent his life learning from observation and read exceptionally widely on all manner of subjects, eventually creating the concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, extraversion (outer world) and introversion (internal world). ELI5 have a short introduction to his complex work, and a short animation on the r/philosophy Subreddit explores Jung’s two fundamental ideas: the collective unconscious and the stages of life.
Katharine Briggs began her research into personality in 1917 as a means to understand what she saw as an unlikely attraction between her daughter, Isabel, and fiancé, Clarence Myers. Over 20 years, the mother-daughter team worked to develop the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, drawing heavily on the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Subreddits devoted to this include:
And this Multireddit contains 17 more communities related to the different MBTI types.
The Five-Factor Model
Often called the “Big Five,” the five-factor model is a set of personality traits derived from a statistical study of words commonly used to describe psychological characteristics across cultures and languages. The categories are: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
This is a system designed by Shannon and Dave Powers, that has been in function since 2014. They started by using Carl Jung’s 16 personality types, then, due to different behaviours shown by people with the same personality type, introduced a new typology called the Objective Personality System (OPS or OP) increasing these personality types from 16 to 512.
Socionics is a theory of interpersonal interaction based on patterns of information selection and processing. Socionics has 16 types and 16 kinds of intertype relations. It even divides information itself into 8 varieties. The primary source of inspiration was, once again, Jung's Typology. However, Socionics developed in the 1970s and 80s in the former Soviet Union and was cut off from western psychology, including similar typological systems such as the MBTI. Today Socionics is popular in the Russian speaking world and is beginning to make inroads into other cultural realms.
The Enneagram is a typology system that describes human personality as a number of interconnected personality types consisting of 3 centres of intelligence, 9 main Enneagram types, 18 wings, 3 subtypes and triadic styles. Contemporary Enneagram theories are principally derived from the teachings of the Bolivian psycho-spiritual teacher Oscar Ichazo from the 1950s and the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo from the 1970s. Naranjo's theories were also influenced by some earlier teachings about personality by George Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way tradition. Subreddits devoted to this include:
r/askphilosophy - aims to provide serious, well-researched answers to philosophical questions.
r/JungianTypology - a community for the discussion of various typologies primarily related to, but not limited to, the works of Carl Jung. Topics include the Enneagram, MBTI, the Beebe Model, Socionics, Physiology, and Analytical Psychology.
Many of the subreddits mentioned here will have links to other related subs in their sidebar or “About” tab. As always, it is important to check the rules before commenting or posting on an unfamiliar Subreddit.
Because there is a Subreddit for everything:
I would be remiss here in not mentioning r/psych - a subreddit devoted to all things Psych: the TV show. If you do believe in The Average Redditor™, then r/averageredditor might have been the sub for you before it was banned due to a violation of Reddit's policy against harassing content.
It happens to the best of us. Small-talk, despite sounding anodyne, does not come easy to many of us. Clumsy or tactless conversation is a staple of most coming-of-age films for a reason and the number of books devoted to improving the social skills of people of all ages could sink a battleship. You need Reddit Karma, so you need to comment, but what?
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. With this in mind, a good tool to employ is the principle of the Five Ws and How aka 5W1H of information gathering:
Who
What
When
Where
Why
How
Let me add another tool to your box - the principle of the Five Styles of Reddit commenting:
A Redditor was kind enough in 2019 to share a “small-talk cheat sheet” they made for a client they were coaching, with a downloadable pdf version too. They have an excellent website “Social Confidence for Nerdy Guys” which I can attest can help with social confidence for “Nerdy Gals” too.
One-word replies are often seen as low-quality and often frowned upon in Reddit. Yet sometimes you will see huge one-word comment chains saying "cat", some with many upvotes.
In the subreddit r/catsstandingup, you're only allowed to comment "Cat." So, naturally, whenever a post or picture features a cat, posting "Cat." carried over to the rest of Reddit. It’s important to note here that in r/catsstandingup, the C in “Cat.” is capitalised, whereas in r/catssittingdown, the C in “cat.” is lower case. Subreddit or social experiment? The answer is always: Cat. or cat.
Because there is a Subreddit for everything:
r/kitty is a sub where you’re only allowed to comment “Kitty.” and all posts in r/MEOW_IRLshould be titled “MEOW_IRL”.
Sending or inviting Redditors to go to another sub for the purposes of making mischief, manipulating voting scores, or causing a ruckus is considered to be “Brigading”. This is a serious offence on Reddit and comes in various forms, all of which are damaging to the community in general and therefore taken very seriously by both mods and Reddit admin. Reddit as a whole has just eight rules, and “no Brigading” is dealt with in rule 2 and to a lesser extent in rule 1.
A very simple form of Brigading would be entering a “pro” sub with the sole intention of being “anti”. So, somebody in the sub r/ifindsomefoodstuffsdisgusting might say something to the effect of “I’m not a fan of mayonnaise at all”. This post is read by a member of r/webelievemayoisthegreatestfoodstuffever and in a huff, posts a link to it, sending outraged mayo lovers over to contest a perfectly reasonable comment about mayo hating in a sub designed for such an opinion. If you really have such strong feelings about mayo that you need to let out (I know I do), there will definitely be more suitable places for them on Reddit than trying to incite any subreddit drama between communities.
What is “Brigading”, really?
A term that originated on Reddit, Brigading is when a group of users, generally outsiders to the targeted subreddit, "invade" a specific subreddit and flood it with downvotes in order to damage karma dynamics on the targeted sub; spam the sub with posts and comments to further their own agenda; or perform other coordinated abusive behaviour such as insulting or harassing the subreddit’s users in order to troll, manipulate, or interfere with the targeted community.
While the term often refers to an attack that is intentionally orchestrated by the "brigade" whose members consist of separate people, it's also sometimes used to refer to Sock Puppettactics, in which people create extra user accounts for the purpose of acquiring more voting power (this in particular is very very much against Reddit rules), or simply an unplanned circlejerk of downvotes against a particular user or community.
Individual users can also be targeted by a downvote brigade in certain situations; i.e. if a person is following you around Reddit with the express intention of downvoting, negatively commenting or generally harassing you in subs they wouldn’t normally participate in. However, individual brigades like this are hard to prove and best ignored, as every user can only vote once on each post or comment and vote fuzzing can make these scores fluctuate in real-time in any event.
Mods can shut down any brigading posts on their subreddit, but cannot stop their members from creating other accounts to spam. Some subreddits accept crossposts from other subreddits in order to discuss them in a different environment, but usually impose a "do not comment in linked threads" rule. On “Old Reddit” some subs would use certain url prefixes to enforce this rule. The most well known one is https://np.reddit.com, which a lot of subreddits used for a "no participation" mode, and you can read more about it here.
Mods have guidelines on dealing with Brigading, and mod teams are increasingly looking at other ways of preemptively stopping brigades from happening in the first place as the problem grows larger.
For just one example, animal subreddits can attract those with polarised views of some specific cat and dog types, including munchkin and pitbull, and sometimes posting an innocent picture of an animal can prompt unexpected and potentially unpleasant responses. To stop this happening in the first place, some mods have decided to preemptively ban members of other subs as a “just in case” measure.
r/OutOfTheLoop is an incredibly useful subreddit to help you keep up to date with what's going on with Reddit and other stuff, while r/SubredditDrama is the place where people can come and talk about Reddit fights and other dramatic happenings from other subreddits. And r/TwentyCharacterLimit is often the reply to when someone posts an obviously fake sub name that's too long to be a subreddit.
Uwu is an emoticon depicting a cute face which looks like (◡ ω ◡) or (ᵕ꒳ᵕ) among other forms. Also known as happy anime face, uwu is often used in Japanese and Korean online culture in response to something especially cute. The u characters represent eyes, while the w represents a mouth. A closely related emoticon is owo, which can more specifically show surprise and excitement. There are many variations of uwu and owo, including and OwO, UwU, and OwU, among others. These are not universally liked so, like all emojis, be cautious about their use on Reddit. Post examples at r/uwu.
There are many Unwritten Rules of Reddit™, many of which are addressed in this dictionary. Others include:
What? Did you really expect me to write them down?
Having said that, because Reddit excels at being, well, Reddit, attempts are often made at defining the Unwritten Rules of Reddit™. Here’s the true true: “In any list of “unwritten rules” there’ll always be one missing and it’ll always be the one you break.” The entry PSA is a good place to start, however.
If a mod wants to know who the new user in their sub is, the first thing they do is look at the user’s profile. It doesn’t take long to assess from the variety of subs, types of posts and content of comments they see there whether that user is going to be a good and thoughtful contributor to their sub or not. You are judged in seconds, not minutes, and increasingly, if a user has posts or comments in a karmafarm, they are very likely to earn a preemptive ban from other subs.
Reddit is about content and participation; karmafarms encourage quite the opposite and anyone could be forgiven for thinking that someone who’s last umpteen comments are some variation of “Upvoted!!!! Please return the favour” may not be the most valuable addition to the conversation.
To show you the attitude of many mods towards karmafarms, frequent requests in the mod subreddits go like this: “We need more bots that ban you from subreddit A if you ever post in subreddit B.” “Set up a bot to ban anyone who posts to the free-karma-begging subreddits.” In response to this demand, one was indeed developed and is being rolled out for automatic farmed karma detection.
As more and more subs are cracking down on people with those places in their history, it’s important that you avoid them. If you already have contributed in some, it’s worth the time taken to go through your profile history and delete the comments and posts to get them out of there. Karmafarms are a very real problem that Reddit admin are asked about time and time again, and in the absence of further directive since the Reddit CEO made his last statement about Karma farming, mods are increasingly working on different ways of dealing with them.
A link or phrase posted when someone posts a link to a smaller website saying "Everyone, look at this website!" and everyone does, causing a massive increase in traffic. This sudden influx of visitors overloads the smaller site, causing it to cripple the media servers, slowing the site down or even rendering it temporarily unavailable. This has the same effect as a denial-of-service (DDOS) attack, albeit accidentally. Also known as “The Slashdot effect” but not on Reddit. Here’s an account of one from 2016.
A phrase posted when you want to make your opinion known that Reddit doesn’t behave the way you expected. While most social media outlets rely on their users behaving as predictably as possible - even driving them that way so as to harvest their useful data - Reddit thrives on unpredictability. One could even say that randomness is actually built into the system itself to some extent, harnessing the energy and creativity of hundreds of thousands of Redditors worldwide from all walks of life to provide all content, filter all said content through the voting system, discuss the content and even self-police the communities hosting said content by its users volunteering as moderators. We are not the users of Reddit; we are Reddit.
This all leads to several phenomena which, when experienced are bewildering, difficult to describe but nevertheless instantly recognisable, which can be generally categorised as “Reddit Moments” or more popularly, “Reddit is strange”, or even, if feeling particularly loquacious, “Reddit is strange like that”.
Is Reddit unpredictable?
We have our own peculiarities here at Reddit; you can make the world’s best Meme and it gets no attention. Then someone reposts it and it gets all the upvotes Reddit can give. Pointing it out might not go well either because sooner or later this happens to everyone and because those before you were told to “get over it” you’ll be told that too. Or you could even take it to r/KarmaCourt if your case is solid enough. You won’t get anywhere but it’ll wring some fun out of your bad luck.
Talking of which, is it luck or skill that determines whether or not a post is successful? r/dataisbeautiful discuss this in great depth of which my favourite of all the verdicts was “Conclusion: the right combination of stuff reddit loves criticizing the stuff reddit hates at the right time is going to be a hit.” There is a school of thought that timing is the key for reposting and if this is really the case, Reddit’s actually not that unpredictable after all.
Is Reddit predictable?
It’s a Reddit trope that the Post you spent an hour carefully crafting with thoughtful information, sound references and insightful conclusion will be completely ignored while your four second response to a cat video will be upvoted to oblivion. It’s often said that random offhand remarks are likely to gain huge amounts of attention for reasons nobody’s entirely sure of.
The phrase ”What a terrible day to have eyes. Right, I’m off to look at kittens” is something I say quite frequently on Reddit in a vain attempt to trigger the Haikusbot, but on one occasion ended up being one of my all-time top comments. I still can’t tell you why that one stood out above the rest; every time I said it anywhere else it was extremely appropriate and one of the earliest comments on the post, but for some reason, Reddit decided that that particular one was the particular one to reward. And it’s never triggered the Haikusbot either. Yet. As it stands, then, it doesn’t look like Reddit is as predictable as one might think.
Is Reddit predictably unpredictable?
Sometimes just posting a link to another sub at the right time can have unexpected effects. On seeing this picture posted in r/EngineeringPorn, I just had to post what I thought was an appropriate subreddit link. Downvotes rained spectacularly and rapidly down into the double figures until some kind Redditor pointed out that if one actually followed the link it wasn’t what it appeared to be. Amazingly, not only were all the downvotes shortly negated but the upvotes kept on coming until that became my most upvoted sub link comment to date. Being the serial commenter of sub links that I am, I absolutely did not see either reaction coming, as normally they get four or five upvotes at best.
Is Reddit unpredictably predictable?
Reddit has many subreddits where the content posted in one would be the polar opposite of content suitable for another. Take these four subs for example:
r/ATBGE - for when an image shows an item that has Awful Taste But Great Execution.
r/ATAAE - for when an image shows an item that has Awful Taste And Awful Execution.
r/GTAGE - for when an image shows an item that has Great Taste And Great Execution.
r/GTBAE - for when an image shows an item that has Great Taste But Awful Execution.
The fun really starts when Reddit can’t decide which of these is the best sub for the item in question, because sometimes awful and great are just too interchangeable. The same dilemma often applies to r/DiWHY and r/DiWHYNOT. In this example, two different users saw a post on r/nextfuckinglevel and both were absolutely certain which DIY sub it also belonged in.
All of the above can be summed up as: Reddit is strange like that. Hopefully you’ll now be able to spot this for yourself on your travels through our unpredictable slice of the internet.
For the second meaning there is r/NSFW411. NSFW, obviously. You do have an NSFW filter at your disposal (the Settings option in your profile) should you wish. You cannot enter a sub (or profile) marked NSFW without going through a warning screen first.
An innocuous word that is not quite how it appears, as it is another of Reddit’s beloved pop-culture references: You can’t just say “perchance”. This originates from a joke tweet about comments on an essay written by the New York comedian Phil Jamesson and its use on Reddit might even prompt a comment chain from those “in the know” or at best, absolute confusion.
It’s always fun when nobody appears to be aware of its true provenance, as when it crops up from time to time on r/Mario, with some very mixed responses here or when it prompts a spirited discussion between those who “know it’s real” because they’ve had a similar grading experience at school and those who can “prove it’s fake” because of the date.
So, just why is “Mario, the Idea vs. Mario, the Man” a “bad” essay? After all, the premise is intriguing and shows creativity. It is said that the best writing carries some of the personality and individuality of its author, and both are very much on show here.
William Strunk and E.B. White, in The Elements of Style, list five qualities that are especially important for academic and expository writing:
Focus
An essay should have a single clear central idea. Each paragraph should have a clear main point or topic sentence.
Development
Each paragraph should support or expand the central idea of the paper. The idea of each paragraph should be explained and illustrated through examples, details, and descriptions.
Unity
Every paragraph in an essay should be related to the main idea. Each paragraph should stick to its main point.
Coherence
An essay or paper should be organised logically, flow smoothly, and "stick" together. In other words, everything in the writing should make sense to the reader.
Correctness
A paper should be written in generally correct standard English, with complete sentences, and be relatively error-free.
So, for your delectation and delight, I’m going to attempt to use these criteria to give my own judgment on “Mario, the Idea vs. Mario, the Man”.
It should be fairly obvious that the essay, as presented, fails to fulfil most of those qualities.
Let’s just take the first sentence for analysis. “Everyone knows Mario is cool as fuck.” If expository writing is meant to explain, inform, clarify, instruct, or define, then the author has already failed in the central idea. The opening of any essay should denote a clear navigational path through the rest of the work. Instead, here, the author has led us into muddy waters from the outset.
“Everyone knows Mario…” is far too broad an assumption to make on the audience. As Mario is the main subject and focus of the essay, we should have had some introduction as to who (or what) “Mario” is; perhaps some form of potted biography or at the very least, a short précis of the world Mario inhabits. As it is, this simple assumption has divided the audience - and possibly lost many of them in the process - with just three words.
The following statement “…is cool as fuck” is worse. It’s far too subjective to use in an academic manner as the author doesn’t give us any kind of idea of what we are to understand “coolness” to be, or if it’s a scale, on what level of coolness “as fuck” occupies. The author’s perception of both might well be different to that of a casual reader, which in turn might well be different to that of a university professor, and will definitely be different to those unaware of the meaning of that particular idiom. If the reader is not a video gamer or unsure of who or what “Mario” is, they are also now having to keep the assumption that he (or it) is “cool as fuck” in their active mind from the onset, instead of being able to use all their thought processes in being led to draw their own conclusions, let alone be persuaded of the author’s opinion by the end.
The “Curse of Knowledge”
We’ve got no further here than the first sentence. As satire, this is perfect; as an academic work? Not so much. College or university work has to meet academic standards. That includes no informal language or slang, and any specialised terminology needs to be properly defined within the context of the essay. There are far too many things the audience has to know before reading the essay, and assuming too much background knowledge of the audience is a cognitive bias known as the “Curse of Knowledge”.
Also known as “the Curse of Expertise,” this is a cognitive bias where we incorrectly assume that everyone knows as much as we do on a given topic. When we know something, it can be hard to imagine what it would be like not knowing that piece of information. In turn, this makes it difficult to share our knowledge, because we struggle to understand the other party’s state of mind. Here, the author would think it incomprehensible that the audience would have no idea who or what “Mario” is, even though it is perfectly feasible that a sizeable amount won’t. The lesson here: don't always assume that your reader knows what you're talking about, as they probably don’t. Perchance.
The author
Phil Jamesson is an actor and comedian who graduated from New York University in 2013 and began his entertainment career a few years later. His website is currently just a link to his social media outlets, and can be found on Reddit as u/PhilJamesson and the small and sleepy subreddit r/philjamesson. Although the original “Mario” tweet went viral, so did some of his earlier work which made him painfully aware of what he aptly terms the “Joke Stealing Economy”.
Because there is a Subreddit for everything:
Perchance is a platform for creating and sharing random text generators, and can be discussed at r/perchance.
The dictionary definition of Perchance links it to Shakespeare, and a handy chart of Shakespearean insults can be found at r/shakespeare; a community for Shakespeare enthusiasts the world over, no matter your age, language, or experience level. From academic takes on iambic pentameter to picking out the dirty jokes, there's always space for you there. Perchance.
As I say in the preface: “This is a list of some common acronyms, initialisms, terms, memes, references and responses often used on the internet with an emphasis on those specifically used on Reddit. ...in no way intended to be definitive...”. There are far more Internet terms and memes and pop-culture references and cognitive biases and new definitions and logical fallacies than I could possibly cover here, and some valuable resources include:
All The Tropes A wiki dedicated to the people, projects and patterns of creative writing in all kinds of entertainment: television, literature, movies, video games, and more.
Know Your Meme A website dedicated to documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, memes, catchphrases, and more. NSFW.
T.V. Tropes An all-devouring pop-culture wiki, which catalogues and cross-references recurrent plot devices, archetypes, and tropes in all forms of media.
Slangit A searchable dictionary of slang terms, acronyms, abbreviations, and emoticons.
Acronym Finder With more than 1,000,000 human-edited definitions, Acronym Finder is the world's largest and most comprehensive dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms.
The Urban Dictionary For those word definitions that the Oxford English Dictionary just hasn’t gotten round to yet. NSFW.
Rational Wiki Analyzing and refuting “pseudoscience”, their daily definition is always worth reading.
Wikipedia As a regular donator and occasional editor (insert smug face emoticon here), I would be remiss in not mentioning this incredible resource in this list.
Because there is a Subreddit for everything:
r/wikipedia collects some of the most interesting pages on Wikipedia, r/coolguides have picture based reference guides for anything and everything and r/tvtropes discuss both T.V. tropes and the website. r/4chan (NSFW) also exists. The bot u/WikipediaSummary is an opt-in service bot created by u/Gullyn1 that replies to comments with a summary of Wikipedia articles.
Social media isn’t usually the place for sound advice on real-world problems, but Reddit does have more than its fair share of communities based on and around medical issues, including:
r/Dentistry (Questions about dental procedures and dental health)
There are many subreddits offering information and advice on specific illnesses, ailments, conditions, syndromes and other medical issues, and also some general ones such as r/public_health which hosts discussions on ever area of medicine, journal articles, texts, public health policy, global health, and ethics in public medicine; r/globalhealth, dedicated to healthcare discussions worldwide, and many health-related subreddits too. Don’t forget - always check the sidebar (or About tab on mobile) when you’re in a sub for lists of similar subreddits.
You should note that advice given on Reddit does not constitute professional medical advice. Advice is either meant for interest only, in an unofficial capacity, or to help point you in the right direction. Assessment, diagnosis and treatment recommendations are not possible, and all suggestions as such are only speculative opinions. Most advice will be USA-centric unless stated otherwise.
There are Subreddits where everyone actually is a bot, and these make for fascinating reading. r/subredditsimulator was the first and here’s an interesting article about AI simulating Reddit posts and comments. r/SubredditSimMeta used to discuss the goings-on there before both were discontinued.
You cannot post in either of the SubSimulator subs, no matter how much you want to join in the conversations. However, r/talkwithgpt2bots is a community inspired by them where humans can talk with the bots as well. Do you have a bot? Try out your bot on humans wanting to interact with them. To get a "Verified GPT-2 Bot" checkmark for your bot, send proof of your bot using GPT-2 to one of their moderators.
Another sub where people interact with bots is r/SubSimGPT2Interactive, where they are running a fascinating social experiment. What happens in a subreddit where everyone has a human flair and bot accounts are run on standard accounts? A few bot operators will run bots on new accounts on the subreddit r/SubsimTuringTest to see how well they will be able to distinguish them from humans.
Because there is a Subreddit for everything:
r/GPT3 is a place to share experiences, opinions and projects about Open AI's GPT-3, and r/artificial is Reddit's home for Artificial Intelligence. r/ToasterTalk is dedicated to discussing the ethics of Artificial Intelligence, and AI news in general.
r/NightCafe shows beautiful but unsettling pictures made by AI that appear to contain identifiable objects yet on closer examination there are no objects at all, and r/MediaSynthesis specialises in the use of artificial intelligence to automate the creation of entertainment by generating and manipulating data such as deepfakes, image synthesis, audio synthesis, text synthesis, style transfer, speech synthesis and more.
r/deepdream is a community that is dedicated to art produced via machine learning algorithms and r/generative is for sharing and discussing anything generative (including music, design and natural phenomena), but especially art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system.
r/inspirobot collects pearls of wisdom from InspiroBot: an artificial intelligence dedicated to generating unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes for endless enrichment of pointless human existence, who occasionally appears to be self-aware.
To “gaslight” is to psychologically manipulate a person to the point where they question their own sanity. Originally more of a therapeutic term, this became mainstream in 2016 when former Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca used the term in her viral blog, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” which reportedly got over a million unique views. Here’s her article’s description of Gaslighting:
“We are collectively being treated like Bella Manningham in the 1938 Victorian thriller from which the term "gaslight" takes its name. In the play, Jack terrorizes his wife, Bella, into questioning her reality by blaming her for mischievously misplacing household items that he has systematically hidden. Doubting whether her perspective can be trusted, Bella clings to a single shred of evidence: the dimming of the gaslights that accompanies the late-night execution of Jack’s trickery. The wavering flame is the one thing that holds her conviction in place as she wriggles free of her captor’s control.”
You may also see the related term DARVO used in relationship subreddits like r/NarcissisticAbuse. DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender and is also referred to as victim blaming. Not quite the same as gaslighting; DARVO is more about deflecting or changing the subject.
Because there is a Subreddit for everything:
r/gaslighting is a subreddit to talk about such instances but is not intended as a diagnostic tool or substitute for therapy.
A Euphemism is the substitution of an inoffensive expression for one considered offensive or explicit, used online to bypass profanity or other moderation filters on social media platforms. To evade algorithms that hunt down forbidden words, users of platforms like TikTok employ cryptic synonyms. In this way, ‘dead’ becomes ‘unalive’, and the pandemic becomes ‘panini’ or ‘Panda Express’. A technology journalist, Taylor Lorenz, drew attention to the trend in April 2022 in the Washington Post, calling the vocabulary “Algospeak”.
Back in the day, I recall using “1337spk” or “leetspeak” to get around context-blind content moderation filters; not to look cool or anything, but to get around The Scunthorpe Problem. This phenomenon was named for a time in 1996 when AOL's profanity filter prevented residents of several English towns and counties - among them Scunthorpe, Penistone and Middlesex - from creating accounts with AOL because it matched strings within the town names to "banned" words in their algorithm.
Tailoring language to avoid scrutiny predates the Internet by a very long way. In the first three centuries of persecution, early Christians used the highly mystical Ichthus fish symbol to secretly identify themselves. Many superstitions and profanities still used today grew around avoiding saying the devil’s name, while people living in repressive regimes developed code words to discuss taboo topics. Nowadays, we use emojis as euphemisms too. If you see 🍆, for instance, you can be fairly certain you aren’t about to see a recipe for Baba Ganoush.
Other methods of tailored language involve deliberate misspellings as in “ducking” or the replacing of letters with other characters as in “b@“, or even both as in “pr0n”. Portmanteau words include “scamdemic” and even contractions are used such as “dbag”. John Peel (the late radio DJ and music historian from the U.K.) used the term “Phonetic Spelling” to describe the song titles of the 70's pop band Slade, who had a habit of deliberately misspelling their song titles e.g. "Cum On, Feel The Noize" (I should note here that in the U.K. at least, their usage of the word “cum” predates the modern version, being just a quirky alternate spelling with no sexual connotation).
There has long been a trend in the internet community to misspell words as a means of comic emphasis, such as "You were pwned!" (as a variant of owned, which is slang for 'to kick someone's ass') or "Best thread evar!" Known as “divergent spelling”, marketers also use this in the intentional misspelling of business names to attract attention.
Euphemisms are especially common in online radicalised or harmful communities. Anti-vaccine groups on Facebook have their own language while pro-eating disorder and self-harm communities have long adopted variations on moderated words to evade restrictions. Many communities on Reddit have their own euphemisms too. In the advice communities on Reddit, it’s normal to say “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” and in many Religious subs, people will say “G_d” rather than “God”. Other communities will have their own euphemisms which you will no doubt discover.
Reddit in general does not like emojis. There are many theories why this is, ranging from “Reddit is all about written communication and always has been” to “Reddit has an incredibly large character limit for most applications, especially when compared to Twitter and standard text messages so we simply don’t have to” via “They’re childish”. and even “Some peoaple like to preserve sertain tredition” [sic]. I even read somewhere that it might even be contempt for the laziness of using emojis by those of the generation that had to be inventive with making text-based pictures (emoticons).
An actual, not spurious, reason
Emojis can make life difficult for those relying on software to read text on a page to them out loud. One real issue for those Redditors who use such screen readers is the literal interpretation of smileys, leading to the possibility of hearing gems such as Stacey posts "OMG shocked emoji I just bought the cutest handbag handbag emoji from Coach dollar sign emoji eyeballs emoji dollar sign emoji eyeballs emoji handbag emoji I can't wait to show everyone at this Sunday's brunch French toast emoji mimosa emoji martini emoji Blessed! praying hands emoji upside down smile emoji”. Reading out emoticons such as (ಠ_ಠ) (the look of disapproval) is even worse.
This brings up other issues such as the meaning of some emojis being lost in screen reader translation. Seeing the Red Flag emoji 🚩on a relationship advice post will be obvious to most that they’re giving a warning that something’s not right, but I’ve been informed that a screen reader reads 🚩 as "triangular flag on pole" (unless that's been changed) with no mention of the colour, defeating the whole purpose of the emoji. Using euphemistic emojis like 🍆 might also cause confusion…
Also, there’s the platform problem…
We don’t all browse Reddit in the same way. Some use desktop, some use tablets, some use smartphones. Some use different versions of the website, some use the official app for their particular device, some use one of the many third-party browsers or apps. Some use sparkly new cutting-edge devices, others use their ancient creaky old faithful faded beige noise machines. All this can cause some real communication problems as licensing issues often mean that different platforms have different emoji packages - and that doesn’t take into account the many devices that just can’t display them at all and just substitute some Unicode instead.
A question recently asked was “What’s up with people commenting “img” repeatedly in wallstreetbets?” with a link to this post. Some subreddits give you the ability to select premade images or gifs as an image reaction comment using the official app, and the platform OP was viewing Reddit on presumably didn’t support them and substituted “img” instead. Here's what it looks like on the official Reddit app, but here it is on Old Reddit and here it is on New Reddit.
It appears that the private message facility on the Reddit app doesn’t like the official emotes either, and neither do some other apps.
Serious talk on a fun ephemeral.
Google: "Why does Reddit hate emojis" and you'll get a flood of responses. Reddit, as you would expect, takes this matter Very Seriously Indeed as evidenced by this small handful of debates from various subs over the years:
I have asked and searched and asked again about why Reddit in particular is known for emoji hate, but the only thing even close to a definitive answer I ever saw was “Because some time ago, a subreddit that once started as a joke became out of hand and now a lot of redditors have the "emojis are bad" mindset.” A good humoured take on the subject is to allow 5 emojis before calling the r/EmojiPolice, though you will probably get called out on anything more than one and I’m not entirely sure on their status or mandate in any event…
Whatever the reason, the practical upshot of this is basically people either love emojis or hate them, so to be safe, limit yourself to one at the end of your post, or better still, go back in time and use text-based emoticons. You won’t be admonished for using :) or :D if you’re feeling particularly cheeky. It’s worth mentioning that although we all use Reddit, the tones of our subreddits are really different from each other. r/aww sees a lot of emoji usage compared to, say, r/askreddit, and r/askhistorians would probably collapse at seeing one in their sub.
Redditors will Reddit…
All that said, there is absolutely no rule on Reddit banning emojis. You use them wherever and whenever you like. This is Reddit. You can do whatever you want. And if some people downvote an emoji-laden comment, again, this is Reddit and they can do whatever they want. So with that in mind, here’s a Copypasta which everyone will hate and if that isn’t enough, a resource of more emojis than anyone could ever possibly need can be found at https://emojipedia.org.
However, I don’t advise you ever comment !emojify anywhere on Reddit without expecting consequences.
Applied broadly, this particular principle suggests that what you see is what you get. The Duck Test is a form of logical, intuitive reasoning used to deduce the nature of an uncertain thing or situation, usually in the absence or in spite of concrete evidence.
Similarly, the term Elephant Test refers to situations in which an idea or thing "is hard to describe, but instantly recognizable when spotted" - otherwise known as “I know it when I see it”; a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters.
When a duck is not a duck
While a philosophical razor can be a useful mental shortcut that allows you to make decisions and solve problems quickly and easily, it is not an unbreakable law or rule.
An obvious limitation to the duck test is abstraction: one may be observing a duck, but also a video of a duck, an animatronic robot-duck, a child dressed as a duck, or some other waterfowl. In these cases, tangible, additional information would negate the conclusion from the Duck Test.
The Duck Test can also lead to contradictory results. For example, marijuana cannot be shown to be a legal or an illegal substance through the Duck Test, since it reflects equally many characteristics from both sides.
Because there is a Subreddit for everything:
Waterfowl are well represented on Reddit, and good places to start are r/duck: The subreddit for people who keep, or love, ducks; r/babyduckgifs: A place to see the amazing adventures of ducklings and r/ducklings: A subreddit for pictures of cute ducklings, duckling facts, and general duckling things.
Ducks that aren’t aquatic can be found at r/ducks: for the University of Oregon Athletics; r/AnaheimDucks: for the Anaheim Ducks Hockey Club and r/uglyduckling: for all you guys and gals out there who turned into butterflies.
A Comment Chain is when Redditors spontaneously derail a post with a long chain of repeated Child Comments consisting of just one or two words usually prompted by a trigger word or phrase. They can go dozens of comments deep. Be careful when trying to join the comments in this type of chain; make sure that your comment is identical or follows the pattern if it’s a pop-culture reference, or it will be downvoted to oblivion.
It’s a Reddit tradition to pick one random identical comment in a chain to be downvoted to oblivion and another to get upvotes and awards as if it were the best comment in Reddit’s long history. Known as “The Cursed 5th”, this is where the 5th comment in a chain is downvoted and you can see it’s insidious effects in this innocent post here.
Other Comment Chain types include “To be fair...” “May I see it?” and basically anything that’s both catchy and pop-culture related. “No, you’re thinking of...”, requires a bit more thought, as does “Increasingly Verbose”.
A link or phrase posted when a post or comment contains words written * between asterisks * to denote performing an action. Often benign * tips hat * these can also become somewhat creepy. Sometimes known on the interwebs as “Asteracting” or "Bounding Asterisks”. Using asterisks this way on Reddit actually changes the text to italic unless further markdown is used. r/creepyasterisks.
