When I saw the "Mother in law" trope, the biggest smile came across my face. The dramatic fake in-laws trope has to be my favorite. It reminds me of the indian dramas I used to watch when I was younger lmao. The way the mothers are so cartoonishly evil and the way the characters talk to each other feels like something out of a netflix drama.
I, 19F live in Pakistan with my in-laws. My MIL (45F) gets mad at me for not cleaning or doing enough house chores even though I cook every single meal and clean the entire house every single day. She also makes a point to get mad at me in front of my husband (27M) who then gets mad at me without even hearing me out. His second wife (21F) hates my guts and wants me dead. She gave me a cup of tea that when I sipped it, made me woozy and I woke up in a hospital bed and my MIL yelled at me for 20 months about the hospital bills. My FIL (55M) goes along with everything my MIL says. My only friend betrayed me by getting with the guy I actually wanted to marry (This marriage i’m in currently is arranged), and my mother and sisters don’t know anything because I don’t want to tell them anything because they’ll worry. I don’t talk back to anyone, I do what everyone in the house asks me to do, but I cry myself to sleep every night and somehow still wake up with shimmery orange eye makeup and glossy lips. AITA? What do I do? :,(
On the infidelity topic, shoutout to that one story about the wife who suspected her husband was having an affair but he was actually just secretly a huge hatsune miku fan
That actually seems to be a unique category too: Jealous girlfriend assumes her man is cheating on her when he's actually been doing something perfectly innocent or even outright altruistic like letting his homeless male friend who just so happens to have long hair use their shower before job interviews causing the girlfriend to find the hairs in the drain and assume the worst. Not exactly ragebait since these stories always end with a wholesome twist, but did you ever notice that it's almost always the *female* partner who ends up looking foolish for assuming such a thing about the good frickin' guy she's pulled? Whenever there's a gender discrepancy like that, it makes sense to question why that is. Can this discrepancy be *reasonably* explained by physical and social differences between men and women or is it more likely that the story is written to simply play into certain ideas and preconceived notions of what men and women are like that happen to be common on sites like Reddit? And reasonably, after the last million Reddit memes that go like: Woman: "I bet he's thinking about other girls!!1!" Man: *actually thinking of something quirky and perfectly innocent* I'm thinking the latter option is far more likely.
@@rainpooper7088also the fact those stories fail to mention how the boyfriend/husband really could have just communicated to their spouse what is going on instead of sneaking around and letting them assume the worst. At that point it isnt her fault she thought you were cheating you were letting some dude she doesnt know shower in your shared house and never told her 💀
also that one where the guy was worried his wife was cheating on him after he found her open diary where she was talking about another man but said another man was actually alucard from castlevania
The ragebait on Reddit was so obvious to me once I saw that the intended "assholes" in almost every story happen to be little kids, sometimes even babies under a year old, disabled people, pregnant women, people struggling with very bad illnesses, inmigrants, foreigners, vegans, etc. Of course anyone can be an asshole, but since I've noticed the pattern of who the asshole is supposed to be on these stories I stopped believing everything I read.
Plus: the infidelity stories on heterosexual relationships when the woman is the one doing the cheating is more of an opportunity for men to "get it all out" if you know what I mean.
I think bc of that, offshoots like r/AmITheDevil(Crosspost sub for posts where the person writing it/the persona in the story is the obvious asshole regardless of judgement in the inital sub) seem to target posts that obviously try to frame a marginalized person as the unreasonable person or call posts bait more frequently since AITA apparently gets pretty militant with how some comments are phrased.
One sub category for Death would be "Funeral Misbehaving." For example: "AITA for going to my ex mistress's funeral?" "AITA for playing a fart noise on my phone as my dad's coffin was being lowered?"
Aside from the obvious bigotry bait ("oh, x-ism is okay because [insert marginalized person here] was a big jerk"), one wonders why these people don't just write soap operas.
So there's a streamer I watch who has Cbat in his playlist because of the meme and I've started associating the song with him, so remembering the origins was like a sucker punch.
never forget that Oppa Homeless Style originated from a subReddit about Tumblr cringe or something and was never a real Tumblr fake story. sidenote please do this with Tumblr fake stories next
@@summerchild_ yep! Sarah Z has a pretty good video talking about the history, search for the original post and realization it was never a real post but that's why if you've ever seen it in the wild it only exists as screenshots
@summerchild_ there are a lot of iconic tumblr posts that upon further inspection were just made up by people on reddit trying to find excuses to hate anyone who wasn’t a skinny cishet male. In the video rachalt mentioned one of the people who made one of those aforementioned posts ran away scared after being confronted lol
The fact that I didn’t realize these weren’t real Reddit posts until the one about removing ladders from the pool is proof of how accurate this video is
Under pets, you missed "fake service animal". Surprised that it didn't come up in the search! It's when someone either tries to pass off an obviously untrained dog as their service dog, or tries to bring some other animal everywhere with them under the excuse of "emotional support animal" (which AFAIK is not legally a thing anywhere)
Emotional support animals are a thing in some places - in the US, an ESA can't legally be denied in non-pet rented housing, but they are absolutely not allowed in non-pet friendly stores or other public places, for example. They're not a thing in the UK, though, and thus ends my knowledge of the legal status of ESAs around the world
Unfortunately that's one I do frequently see in real life. I cannot tell you how often people advise others to lie about an animal being an ESA. It's so frustrating because it makes things so much harder for people who actually need service animals and ESAs. And yes, as the other commenter said, ESAs are a legal thing in the US. It allows people to keep an animal that provides emotional comfort for things like depression and anxiety even in housing units that don't normally allow pets, and potentially get a pet deposit waived (however it must be considered as reasonable, so if the animal causes damage, disturbs others, or causes logistical issues, the person may still be told no or be asked to remove the animal). It requires documentation from someone like a doctor or therapist and (as far as I am aware) only applies to housing. ESAs are not considered service animals and are still not allowed in places that do not allow pets. Also in the US the only animals that can be considered service animals are dogs and, in some states, miniature horses. An ESA can be any animal.
Reddit has a serious hateboner for ESAs in particular. I'd call "disruptive ESA" posts Type 2 because they're almost always told from the perspective of the complainer and the owner of the animal is voted the a-hole. Usually cartoonish BS, but the tamer ones could be real.
As someone who worked in retail for a few years (thank God that I'm out), I've never seen a well-behaved ESA and only seen entitled people who brought in untrained dog(s)
I feel like you just compiled the internets Grimm fairy tales. Like I used to see the internet as a library, but now I see it as being able to speedrun walking up to a stranger in the woods and listening to his wild tale by campfire
my favorite type M post was one about an argument over a "fictional character" where it was later revealed that OP was lying about everyone's age and had gotten in a discord slapfight with their fellow middle schoolers about the dream SMP
@@guggelguggel7491 the story itself was rather generic, but the way OP described being an adult and danced around the "fictional story" sort of tipped people in the comments off and when pushed they admitted they lied about that but the rest was real. pressed further and they revealed the fictional character they were fighting about was "dream from the dream smp". i think the funniest part is that this was clearly a 13 year old looking for a judgement call about their actions but still had some awareness to know that fighting over a minecraft server was ridiculous.
This was great and all but I lost focus because there wasn't any bad Subway Surfers footage playing in the background while text to speech tells me about how OP's wife kidnapped the beanie babies and her mother is making her burn them so they can spread the ashes in Disneyworld
mini trope: absurdly tragic, where bad things keep getting piled onto one character-- ex: teen mom is left at the alter by abusive boyfriend, gets her baby kidnapped by unreasonable family member, and then gets cancer and dies in a car crash on the way to custody battle.
This was fantastic!!!! **suggested category I've seen a lot of: tampered food. mostly consisting of 1. someone trying to sneak meat into a vegan/vegetarian OP's food OR 2. someone trying to feed OP their allergen to "test" OP's allergy or force them to "build tolerance" OR 3. someone is repeatedly trying to sneak something disliked or gross into OP's food
I've heard so much of this real irl and on potentially ragebait posts. I remember one where the christian in-laws of a jewish kosher man secretly fed him, and his kosher children, pork, and the wife was making excuses for the parents
Number 2 kinda reminded me of a story on Reddit where a woman puts coconut product in the child's hair after they been constantly told by the mother that the child was deathly allergic to coconut.
To be honest, as a person of arab descent, amount of times I was "tricked" into eating pork makes me believe these stories ain't fake. Or at least some of them aren't.
can't forget putting something someone would likely not want to eat (ex: laxatives, painfully spicy, sedative, thc, etc) in food that keeps being stolen, usually in a work setting or shared living space.
Even worse, half the ragebait today is bots copying old posts, which is in itself enraging! (also i love the squeak sound effect when you curse, it's so cute)
But why? isn't the fun in rage bait is tricking others? If a robot does the work for you then it kinda takes away the reason to do it in the first place
Screw the posts, can we talk about how utterly unhinged the rules/mods are? There'a rule against posting about interpersonal conflict, against posting asking if your feelings make you an asshole, one forbidding about posting about bodily autonomy, one against posting about abuse. All the rules are stupid and vague and are routinely broken. But the mods constantly delete GOOD posts that are getting engagement, and arbitrarily enforce these completely subjective rules when their fee-fees get hurt or they disagree with someone. I VERY politely DMed the mods asking for clarification on a rule and they were SO incredibly rude I was genuinely embarrassed for them, which is really, really saying something, as most reddit mods are fairly awful.
The top 200 subreddits are modded by the same, like, 3 mods. They're obviously tyrants; they don't have any reason to be nice to you, peasant. It has turned Reddit into an echo-chamber where you aren't allowed to wrong-think and you sure as he'll better not point it out nor complain about it. I realized how terrible it's become after the whole Aimee Challengor fiasco. (Where people were getting banned for mentioning Challengor's father's being arrested for keeping a 7 year old girl tied up in his house, doing all the terrible things you imagine, WHILE HE WAS CHALLENGOR'S CAMPAIGN MANAGER. Yes, Aimee was living in the home at the time and no, Aimee did not tell anyone. About anything.) It was a whole thing.
"Unreasonable asexual" is still pretty rare just because asexuality isn't that well known, but I've noticed it starting to pop up in toxic romance and dead bedroom stories
Oh yeah, those are especially fun because, most of the time, both the poster and the commenters clearly know little to nothing about asexuality or asexual people.
@@sushiroll3795 Yeah, for some people it's a foreign concept that a lot of asexuals do enjoy sex for example, since it's lack of attraction to gender rather than lack of libido/voluntary celibacy
It's a lack of physical attraction to any gender. I tend to explain it like say you see a really pretty flower, you think "wow, that's a pretty flower" But you aren't compelled to have sex with the flower. I think of people the same way people think about flowers. I can appreciate their beauty but that's as far as that goes.
Finally. I feel like I’m going crazy with how often there are posts with 20k upvotes that are CLEARLY FAKE ragebait yet everyone takes seriously. Ugh. Like at this point just make a “fake story rage” subreddit, like r/nosleep so we can have fun. I love the idea of creating a tvtropes for this shit so people are aware. Hopefully this’ll help people 😭😭
The crazy thing is as an orphan who actually has tried to share their story, I feel like I’ve never gotten attention when reaching out for help over fake stories. And they’re so obviously fake too. Like they don’t know if you ask them questions about it or answer super vaguely and people eat it up anyway. It’s really frustrating especially when I was trying to find scholarships, or when I wanted to know other peoples coping mechanisms/ways to adjust to different homes and there were dozens of dozens of spam fake sad/happy orphan stories and only some real ones 🫥 Like it’s not even the big subreddits it even leaks into places where you’re actually looking for resources!
When I first came across the subreddit, AITA posts legitimately made me worry that everyone other than me was living in a cinderella hellish landscape where step-families just hate you and abuse you constantly. Or that its unrealistic, and the worst thing in the world that only horrible monsters would want, for a step parent who raised you since you were three to want to be considered your mother/father.
You are reminding me of my all time fave post: AITA for cutting my step daughter's hair against her will because I don't want her to be vain and having short hair will free up more of her time for doing chores?
Some posts are def fake but there’s def some that are real and the real ones are a spectrum. Saw one earlier where a woman talked about smacking a random child across the face cuz he was trying to take off her bikini top and her AITA question was about her husband saying she kinda overreacted
@@SilverlineXZeroand the 911 one is written with the tone and casualness of a mundane one (AITA was i overreacting for not wanting to talk to a mutual friend after they slightly murdered my whole family?) and the mundane one is written with like a whole villain plot line and drama
@@julieblair7472I remember this one. I was torn between believing them or not. Because my mom used to cut my hair against my will because I have African type hair (we’re both African but we’re North African so our hair can vary) and she didn’t want to deal with it.
In college I wrote an essay for my writing capstone called something like *The Social Function of r/AmITheAsshole* basically discussing the societal role of AITA as a genre. If this video had existed back then I absolutely would have quoted and cited it.
You should ABSOLUTELY do a follow-up for Quora. That site is FILLED TO THE BRIM with ragebait questions. It wouldnt be as long a video since its just questions, but still, itd be really funny Edit: it seems like the categories would be the same. I think a short commenting on it would be cool though!
This counts as “unreasonable trans person,” but I’ve noticed a weird subcategory of “you can’t have my deadname,” where a trans person gets mad at a cis person for having the same name as the trans person’s deadname. It sure is a weird category, considering I’ve never seen this happen. Edit: It's worth noting I've seen this story a couple of times now, but I don't know exactly how prevalent it is, considering I don't browse these subreddits.
I saw one reposted on tiktok a while back that was the exact opposite (except the trans party was still protrayed as unreasonable and for some reason oprepeatedly emphasized that the trans person was autistic despite that not having anything to do with it)
There was one I saw once that was literally just a children's book plot. It was like "AITA for causing my friend to shave her head because she keeps copying me?" and only like one or two other people in the comments pointed out that it was just the plot to Stephanie's Ponytail by Robert Munsch
I've once seen an AITA where OP spent a holiday in a creepy village and then yelled at his uncle when he learned his great-grandma was from this village because what if OP "becomes like them". I repeat, someone deadass posted "The Shadow over Innsmouth" to reddit as a true story.
One thing I have become absolutely certain of over my years of being chronically online is that most every moral panic/stupid discourse about like gay or neurodivergent or leftist or whatever topic started as a reddit or 4chan or kiwifarms ragebait/trolling operation. It’s really hard to get younger people in those communities to ignore the bait and move on and right wing grifters loveeeee picking up on these for there own benefit.
Agree with the sentiment but i think this is more a general social media problem. Twitter and tumblr have their fair share of hate bandwagons to account for as well. Also a lot of this 2010s culture war/ragebait stuff was pushed further by Russian bots trying to create a divide in the American public. I don't think half of those right wing grifters would have said those things, if they hadn't been radicalized by that self same rhetoric, but im probably giving them too much credit.
The gay or neurodivergent or leftist writers are generally encouraged to write fanfiction and the conservative writers had no equivalent until Reddit stories came in vogue except maybe 4chan greentexts
It literally always goes back to 4chan/8chan/8kun/whatever silly new name they're calling themselves in order to scurry away from the spotlight and back under the rock they came from. Really at it's core it's a subset of some of the most bitter, sad, dejected losers on the planet coming together to sow whatever negativity they can because it's the only thing they have left to feel anything.
This vastly overestimate the organisational capabilities of the users on those sites, who are often too busy (figuratively) cannibalising each other with infighting to get themselves involved in even targeted operations against one person, never mind entire social media sites. It's very easy for people's social media peers to exploit their gullibility and propensity for e-rage just for the sake of "doing a little trolling" on an individual basis.
This was hilarious. Before I quit reading Reddit I noticed the ‘angelic OP’ thing for sure- either the title makes OP seem like a monster then the text has them behaving angelically, or the title is the most innocuous thing possible and it turns out the OP kicks puppies as a hobby. Both are equally fake and possibly also fetish bait.
I’m not even 15 minutes in and every time you bring up one of these seemingly super niche categories I realize I’ve read dozens of stories with that premise. Unreal how fake these Reddit stories actually are.
I (35, M), my girlfriend (33, F), her brother (33, M), and my best friend from college (36, M) were all bored one day so we decided to hijack a rocket ship and take a trip into space. Everything was going smoothly until we were exposed to strange cosmic radiation. When we landed, we realized that we developed fantastic new abilities. I could stretch my body into any form, my girlfriend could turn invisible and create force fields, and her brother could turn into a blaze of fire and fly into the air. However my best friend from college got a new rocky body, which he hated. He said that he “made him feel like a monster” and “I can’t pilot a plane like this!” I told him that it was an accident and hew knew the risks. He said that it was my fault for bring him along something so dangerous. AITA?
not to nickpick, but um actually Sue and Johnny are different ages and Johnny is always depicted as younger than everyone else! He's been as young as 18ish and attending college, at least when they first debuted! love the way you wrote this tho!
OPITA, you should’ve checked the ship for any way you could’ve been exposed to weird cosmic radiation before stealing it, and you should’ve swapped bodies with your friend, you’re clearly just being selfish about keeping cool powers
I was going to start this and watch it in pieces throughout the week on my work breaks but then I accidentally just watched the entire thing start to finish in one sitting
You’ve missed one sub-branch of Last wishes ignored/ inheritance dispute: when the last wish of the dying is to give all their money to their (still small) kid, but one or multiple older family members decide to take the money instead; which the kid usually only finds out about once they’re about to go off to college
I’m not sure if it counts as its own separate category but one of my favorite types of posts is where the general consensus is “you’re not an asshole in this situation, but it does seem like you’re an asshole in many other areas of life”
Honestly, redditors accusing me every time I opened up on there of lying for "karma" made me delete that shit so fast. Whether or not other people spread fake stories, assuming everyone you talk to is lying to you is such an unhealthy mindset to adopt. And trying to give yourself a voice just for a bunch of randoms to try and take it away immediately just feels like self harm.
It's such a shame dealing with fake stories and trying to find the real ones. It figures that when a story is real people call it fake but when the story is painfully fake it blows up and everyone believes it. Before I deleted Reddit together (partially because of, imo, clearly rage bait stories that do litter the site and outnumber the real ones) I made a post about how I have trust issues and anxiety because of my dad cheating on my mom and their subsequent divorce. And instead of getting help or tips on how to deal with it, people said I was lying for attention or that I was overblowing my anxiety. I just deleted the post out of frustration after about a week.
i appreciate that you deal with youtube's censorship by just censor-beeping the word, rather than replacing it with some absurd substitute. i'm so tired of people saying shit like "seggs" and "unalive".
Yeah the only time I think it's reasonable to do the substitute thing is when you'll have to repeat the word very often because of the type of video it is and even then it can often be avoided
It works well for some videos, though I've had a lot of videos where I am only listening and it's extremely difficult to figure out the different words being thrown out when they're only ever censored. It's mostly detrimental when directly quoting a lot of info from people who didn't give context clues since they just said the words directly. Those times, I do appreciate some sort of substitute. Explaining a simple acronym or abbreviation before using them is something I've enjoyed in videos like that.
@@homosexula5595 the systematic replacement using the word "unalive" is so widespread it's becoming a normal part of children's lexicons. listen to any podcast that also gets released on youtube, which is a lot of them these days.
would like to add to unreasonable abled person: the “handicap spot” where the disabled OP is accused of not needing a handicap parking spot, often by old people. i would bet a good number of them are true unfortunately but i see this one a lot. very specific but could be broadened to “you’re not disabled” ; also to unreasonable minority, there’s the unreasonable picky eater (often overlapping with unreasonable autistic) especially when the picky eater is described as being spoiled or has an incredibly specific restriction.
As an autistic who has the most support needs in my food sensory issues the last one you mentioned always is most upsetting to me. People are so ableist and have the weirdest cultural obsession with eating food = polite and turning down food = impolite. It has ruined relationships for me.
@@asmrtpop2676I’m so glad that my dad has finally stopped trying to force me to eat foods I don’t like. I’m not *the* pickiest eater, but I’ve got a fair share of texture related issues when it comes to food. Specifically with pasty or gritty things like mashed potatoes, grits, and certain soups. It makes me nauseous, even if I like the flavour of the foods. My dad started understanding this a lot more in my later teens, and now he’ll make me alternate dishes/sides if I want them if he knows he’s going to be preparing something I don’t like. Or simply make those foods on nights where I’m at work, and save the ones I enjoy for days I’m home. I’m also extremely non-adventurous when it comes to eating at restaurants- whether it’s ones I know, or new ones. I’ll always stick to something I know I like, because it’s reassuring and I know I’m gonna be able to eat it. I have set orders at every single sit down and fast food restaurant I go to regularly and never stray from those orders. My extended family members are a lot more critical of this than my parents.
Omg the huge age gaps with the op not wanting the discuss it are soooo frequent in my experience, i operate on the basis that all stories are fake/ragebait but there are so many posts like "my (18F) boyfriend (48M) ....." and then alll the comments being about the obvious age gap with the op reacting to everything like "i didn't ask for advice about the ages" i just like browsing the subreddits when i'm bored sometimes but the posts have become so extremely repetitive it's just not fun anymore
I am 37 mins in and the fact I’ve read a post that fits every category thus far has totally convinced me 99% of the posts I read are probably fake AND that I spend too much time on Reddit
yes! i was thinking of this one! ive also seen “trans person gets mad at someone else for having their deadname” but idk if thats as much of a category in itself
Hahaha I actually did that irl, took the same name as one of my cousin's kids. But like, it's a nice name and if she didn't want me to steal it she should have learned to talk earlier.
You know what's crazy? Just yesterday I saw a podcast on RUclips where some woman (she showed her face) was angry about her trans sister & the "trans agenda". One of the points she made was that she's angry that the trans sister named her daughter with the same name as her sibling
This video inspired me to write the rules for a fictional subreddit called "r/FanFicAITA" where it's just fanfic of characters posting to "r/AITA" since AITA is mostly fictional stories anyway. Not... that I'm ever going to actually make a subreddit for that, but I thought it'd be a fun idea.
This reminds me of a tumblr blog that's called "aita-blorbos" which is basically what you described, fictional characters posting to aita (how it's set up is that people submit posts and the person running the blog will post it, so you still get quite a bit of variety for media).
Oh actually!! r/FictionalAITA already exists and it's a blast I tell you Perfect for those "I [23M] had an argument about politics with my brother-teacher-dad [38M] over an active volcano and now my pregnant wife [28F] is dead AITA?" posts lmao
Idiot tourist story that I witnessed was an American lady asking a Mexican store clerk how much something cost in "real money." Reddit didn't exist back then but this was amazing
Describing these subreddits as "stealth creative writing subreddits" is honestly the greatest thing I've ever heard. I don't even think that's a burn-- they're essentially built around workshopping your ability to get an emotional reaction.
i saw a misgendering freakout post on r/doordash once that was the most reasonable shit ever. the person politely corrected the op (delivery driver) on their pronouns and the driver politely corrected themself, and then went on reddit and acted like this was a horrible crime. and everyone in the comments agreed. that's when i left that subreddit
Yeah often people would side with the poster even when irl most of us would think the other side is the reasonable one. I used to think it's mostly benign misunderstanding but I don't anymore, I think those type of post highlight people secret hate. It actually is a pretty interesting tool to see what people secretly hate. I knew there's a ton of trans hate before Reddit off course, but I didn't realise how much hate there is around relatively benign things like pronouns (as is your example) or dating people who aren't lgbtq+ (mostly "trans person calls me racist because I don't want to date them". There are a ton of those on Reddit, irl this probably never happened) It's a hateful place
After a while you learn that any post in a popular sub is going to be transphobic ragebait and/or will be filled by the most bigoted comments. Hell, anything outside of a trans-centric sub is sure to be like that, even other lgb subs And every few months there is a shit ton of infighting inside of trans subs! The whole site is a mess, i just stay there for the sims 2 sub
@@mauroc1896 yeah, communities online tend to implode, especially as there's a lot of very real pressure coming from other Reddit subs and the world outside. It's really ashame, especially for teens and adults who don't live in cities that desperately need some community. Oh well at least there's cat Reddit - r/illegallysmolcats never disappoints
@@mauroc1896btw you probably shouldn't be leaving off the T in the acronym because that is literally one of the things people that are transphobic do.
I think you missed "You can't wear that," which I used to see more often with a friend or family member complaining about OP, who is just too sexy in their bikini/dress. Often overlaps with an unreasonable religious person, because it's revealing (bonus points if it's not revealing) or an unreasonable fat person, who is jealous of OP's body. These days, I see more with dresses than bikinis and it often overlaps with wedding drama. It also always seems to include a convenient link to where you can buy the dress... "You can't wear that to my wedding" is a very popular microcategory, from wearing white to "you're upstaging me", which is obviously a bridezilla.
the biggest one of me has always been hatred of mothers. in a significant amount of posts of this kind, the villain is a mother that is deemed unreasonable, regardless of the intentions of the autor. mother is a teen? sl*t, irresponsible mother needs a favor due to an emergency? entitled, no one owes you anything just because you got cr**mpied (this is a common phrase/sentiment too, very gross) mother needs a long term support arrangement due to circumstances totally out of her control? should've though about that possibility before you opened your legs and so on a lot of these "villain tropes" easily conflate in the mother archetype: someone that often needs extra help (entitled), that can be mentally unstable due to stress, hormones or disorders like ppd (unreasonable), that is a woman that Has Had Sex (!!!) (sl*t). it's a very easy target, and you'll find that regardless of the author's intentions, mothers are deemed the villain very often. especially if they're single
That's not a pattern I have observed. I'd guess it makes sense, since motherhood is one of the most meaningful and emotionally charged concepts we know.
@@carlpanzram7081 it's a pattern a lot of women have observed. it also makes sense because reddit is rife with sexism so women are always critiqued more and in harsher ways than men
In general, if the villain is a woman, she is going to be venomously despised, and if the villain is a man, he'll be given devil advocates, "we don't know both sides", white knights, and other sympathies. Reddit will say that women are treated better in society but will turn around and say the most vitriolic things torwards women in general
RPG horror stories is an absolute goldmine for all of this. Honestly if stories on there didn’t already fit into so many of these categories just with a D&D coat of paint, I’d say rpg rage bait could be a category all its own. Subcategories for bad DMs and bad players, controlling partners, entitled friends, and lot and lots of extremely over the top creep stories.
That "crazy DM" with the 40 rules that included unreasonable rules like "don't show up too wasted to play" and "don't constantly mock me in our own game" comes to mind lol
One thing I always find fascinating is that the vast majority of posts on these subreddits can be real, but they never get half the up votes of the fake stories because they’re often confusing rambles with no structure. Because your average person sucks at explaining stories in writing, and life is rarely as simple as it is in stories. Storytelling is a craft. Because of this, people have a hard time wading through it, leading to confusion/swiping away and even the belief that the post is fake. I see this especially with the r/helpme subreddit. God I feel so bad for the people on there. Absolutely desperate. But people get zero help because most of their points are confusing or not interesting, and therefore get little views or comments. In sharp contrast to the thousands people scrambling to support and help whatever cheated on father/mother is asking for support this week on r/aita or something. I also love the clarification that just because something CAN happen to someone, that doesn’t mean that these stories are real. I often see comments going “well my mother in law harassed me so there’s a chance this is real,” ignoring the fact that everything else about the story fits so cleanly into the ragebait formula. And like “they’re co-opting your trauma for Internet points” is such a perfect way to put it. Because it’s not like these experiences don’t happen to people, like fiction is based on reality, but that doesn’t mean these stories aren’t trying to provoke you for engagement, influence your world view, or that these stories are necessarily real (especially in conjunction with how neat everything is). They’re co-opting real stories for ragebait, often to push a worldview. Reminds me a lot of Sarah Z’s complicated video on tumblr fake stories.
I do tend to err on treating certain stories as true, at least if I choose to comment on them, mainly stories of abuse. Because if there's even the slightest chance the person is a real victim, I want them to know their situation is not their fault and they need to get out. As an abuse victim myself, I know the mental gymnastics one can perform to justify the things happening, and how hard it is to break that mindset. Even if it's probably fake, I just don't want to risk dismissing a real victim who needs help.
@@hyperturbotechnomike your in laws sound very sweet! IT's SO TRUE the way these stories often have the most bizarrely specific details memorized. Sometimes whole dialogue exchanges lol. like i only started paying attention to "dialogue" when i became a writer and started writing down speech patterns and stuff, but that's not really something most people pay attention to. most people would paraphrase. and yeah, I'm basing my experience off of my own turbulent teen years of going on reddit for help about my abusive mom. i'd read all those posts with supportive and thoughtful comments and assumed I'd also get help. Instead, I got mostly people confused, telling me that she loved me so just have faith (lol), or no feedback at all because I was much less coherent compared to the perfectly curated, top upvoted posts. Like how you can't see a relationship clearly until you've gotten some distance from it, people have a hard time explaining an issue when they're in distress. Now, if I'd used all the tropey reddit terminology like "flying monkeys" or armchair "narcissism" or what have you, I'd have probably gotten more support, but at the loss of the nuance/honesty of what I was trying to say. Cliches and tropes have a tendency to be reductive, especially since they often make it easier to delineate between "villains" and "heroes." My mom isn't a "villain," she does indeed love me, but her actions hurt me, so treating her like an unfeeling villain erases the nuance of abuse, like how it's often perpetrated by the people who "love" us. Also I HATE the way therapy speak has leaked out into the general public from places like reddit fake stories because of the way people use it without really understanding the nuances of psychology, and then support their own ignorance with FAKE stories UGHHHHH In effect, it means people don't recognize abuse in their own lives and can only recognize it if it comes in easy to digest forms. just like how nobody managed to see the issue with my mom on my teenaged post. it's an unending cycle for REAL
I usually instantly realize a post is most likely fake if it's too detailed. While you can embellish to make the story better even if the contents are true, I'd say it's pretty hard to describe something that has happened to you with a "book passage" level of detail if it makes sense, with elaborate dialogue, careful description of one's behavior like their body language, etc
This is a really good point, about how well the things are written. I had to actively remove myself from several subs bc they would upset me so much, I would be weeping while trying to explain to people to get out of abusive situations bc I could see my own naive past self in them, (and even though I’m not familiar with it directly the animal stuff really _really_ upsets me, so it’s a huge relief to know some of those are probably fake bc I have been really heartbroken over those). I have such a hard time accepting my own memories of abuse sometimes bc it would require malicious intent and evil I just can’t comprehend. I still struggle with this bc it feels so implausible. I dunno man it seems pretty shitty to me that certain folks don’t care to just co-opt what they remember hearing from real survivors to get fake attention, but in turn suck up real energy and time. God the internet really is like, the best and the worst of us just getting neutralized into nothingness Reality is so much murkier and meandering. You’ll realize 10 years later that seemingly innocuous things at the time were actually clear proof of coercive control, but you rarely have razor sharp well formed timelines of events. Also, things usually don’t turn out with the hero getting vindication. Just desserts, Justice, or things working out eventually seem to be the most hard to believe element of a lot of these stories. A victim of CSA and domestic violence that marries an abuser she met at 16 who lies to get the kids when she finally leaves him bc that was his threat that kept her there will just go on to have multiple abusive relationships (including one who vindictively helps secure the ex’s hold over her kids bc that was _his_ threat when she’d try to leave _him_ ) is likely to find herself in one screwed up situation after another and maybe she will get therapy, figure out her disorders, and be less obviously distraught all the time but she’s sure as shit not going to be rich and perfect and unscarred by everything. She’s sure as shit not going to have the relationship she wanted with her kids. Stuff takes a toll, it’s subtle and often you blame yourself, you don’t just jump out and pwn your abusers by 28 years old and make everyone regret what they did/apologize/look like the jerks they are. You don’t realize before it’s too late that you should get advice or even have the clarity to know you need it, or the advice will be that you’re breaking your family up for “no reason.” An abuser isn’t going to even think to consult Reddit for a judgement on whether they’re doing the right thing. They either are delusional and think they’re right, or they know they’re wrong but they’d never openly admit as to what the reality was. A gaslighter isn’t going to admit the truth to anyone, and an asshole doesn’t remember a passing interaction with a stranger and wonder if they were right. Assholes live longer. Rich people think they earned what they have, and most perpetrators of abuse will never even think twice about the harm they caused,and their lives will probably be easier than those of their victims. BUMMERS GONNA BE A BUMMER I RECKON *crabwalks out Edited bc I, too, am not only verbose as hell but also illiterate
this video has *everything*. a parody of yakko's world, CBAT as a bleep censor, a throwaway stefon reference, carrie underwood, beanie babies, sims, and a BDG-style spiral into madness. You know, the usage of rigorous methodology to aid in the creation of an intense genre typology for popular media as the presenter undergoes a gradual but increasing dishevelment that reflects their deteriorating mental state. brilliant!
There is a mini world of reddit rage bait you didnt touch on: Bad Dungeons and Dragons Games. Bad DMs, players, player or dm’s family/partner, and more! It has its own tropes (railroading dm, the incel player hitting on a girl player, player who thinks theyre the Main Character [usually an edgy rogue], overstepping minmaxxer, dm hating minmaxxer’s fun, “who needs boundaries? we’re all friends!”, dm kills off character for petty over table reasons, rules lawyer player, general miscommunication). It’s very fun. CritCrab reads a bunch of them it’s so fun :3
What a fascinating rabbit hole. Honestly the "my mother in law keeps pestering me and my husband does nothing" and "my family refused to attend my wedding if theres' no alcohol" are both such common shitty situations in life that I'm inclined to believe they're exceptions and most of them are genuine posts. Might be a cultural thing but where I live, I keep seeing people encounter that.
tbh lots of these categories are often (or most of the time) genuine and not bait, but are also common subjects of ragebait posts. its harder to tell with those unless theyre written badly
yeah some of them are definitely real, but it's kind of easy to spot the fake ones. i can't explain it but there's always one point where i get to like, "this one is definitely a creative writing exercise"
Well thats how it goes. The bait part is that they start with a situation people can relate to and are real, to get people to bite. But then it turns into to something so ridiculous
I've genuinely never known a single person to have bad relations with their in-laws. I've only known some reasonable disagreements like "you shouldn't marry someone who doesn't have a stable job yet because they might find a job that's far away". So either everyone I know is unnaturally chill about their child's choice of partner or people on the internet exaggerate a LOT (obviously the latter).
@@theshire9173 the partner of my boyfriends mom (kinda his stepfather, but the mom is not married to him and my boyfriend doesn't want to call him anything involving the word "father") is a serious asshole like absolutely unreasonable despicable human trash, I expect some trouble coming in our way when we get married or decide to have kids or anything where you normally involve your family to some degree. He definitely is a person that is reddit-ragebait-post-worthy.
I'm so thankful you took the time and effort to dissect this topic for us. As someone with multiple marginalized identities, it's painful o see stories meant to smear public perception of people like me proliferate all over the Internet. I'd hate to come across someone with views corrupted by Reddit posts, someone who only views me as a derivative caricature to be vilified rather than a nuanced human being. Videos like these are big steps in the progression of media literacy and critical thinking, especially when presented with a such a sharp wit! Bravo!
Buen intento Juan Carlos Bodoque, pero todos sabemos de tus deudas y adicción por las apuestas han sido base de destrucción a tus relaciones... eres el culohueco (YTA) BUENO YA MAS EN SERIO, pero pienso lo mismo. Tu comentario es muy elocuente así que gracias
After this video I think I know one. Me and and my best friend first bonded over raging about how shitty life is, and questioning our gender. When I called them a feminist because they'd agreed me, but they answered a strong no, and when I asked why they just said they've seen enought to not to want to be associated with them. Years later I said I might be non-binary they were like "oh that's completely okay", then ranted about people being mad that some lesbians feel insulted being labeled queer (which I now know was a popular terf talking point). When I came out as trans masc they said they're totally supportive, but over the years have talked really negatively about non-passing transes and how the hormones affect the body. And they often rage just in general about horrible things they've heard people do. I feel like they're the type to fall into every hate train and bait (not that I'm judging, I'm extremely naive), and partly because of that fell down into an alt-right rabbithole. Even if ignoring the alt-right pipeline, it's just very tiring to be with someone who's now-a-days always so angry, ranting for hours about stuff that has little if any bearing on their life, and yet they react like somebody shat in their mouth and slapped them while calling their dad a racist.
@@NukkuiskoHyvinVaiPois Omg I pity them. Having all that dumb shit living in your head rent free must be so exhausting. For me, emotions are like muscles; they get tired from overuse. I used to be a huge worry wart when I was younger, but I burnt myself out so I don't worry that much anymore. That person needs a hobby besides reading outrageous stories.
the comprehensiveness. the cbat censor. the yakko warner trigger warning. the slowly disintegrating fit. any time you made a reference in your explanations it killed me. li speaks more like li ATE
There's also period drama. A LOT of period drama. The period posts have even gained the nickname "period troll is back at it again" in "Am I the Angel"
I remember an "unreasonable disabled person" story that turned out to be an "unreasonable caregiver" and "parentification" story that really touched my heart. It was a teenage girl who had been forced to be her autistic younger sisters caregiver for a long time and grew resentful of her. The post was titled something like "aita for despising my mentally handicap sister?" And it was about an incident where she broke down when her dad told her to get a degree that would pay well so she could afford to take care of her sister when the parents were gone. She talks about feeling guilty for hating her sister, but throughout the post it becomes clear that her anger is misdirected. There was an update. She ended up reaching out to her Grandpa, who was shocked that she was the one caring for her sister. Some family members had been sending money to help pay for the professional care that the sister needed, but they just kept it. Grandpa got her out of the house and the extended family rallied around her to give her the support and love she'd been missing. I know this has become a bit of a trope on its own. The parentified sibling of a disabled person is rescued by extended family who thought they were paying for the siblings care. But this one was like 5 years ago. I think it was the first, true one that inspired the copycats. The part that hit the hardest was late in the update post, OP says that through all this, she's realized she doesn't hate her sister, she loves her sister with all her heart and felt deeply guilty for ever projecting her anger onto her.
So, my main subreddit of choice is BORU--best of redditor updates--which is exclusively about OPs who posted updates after taking the advice of AITA, relationship advice, etc. This is also a hotbed of ragebait and fake stories because people will post their fake stories, and then continue the saga for more internet points. Most of your categories have encapsulated the posts on BORU, but if I may have some suggestions: 1) The Tator Tot switcheroo. A woman has a great relationship with her boyfriend or husband, who presents himself as a feminist and liberal, and supports his girlfriend/wife/female partner's career. Then, the male partner either starts listening to Andrew Tate, and either starts demanding the female partner acts as a "high value woman" (ex, she leaves her high-paying executive job to be a stay-at-home-wife) or begins enacting Andrew Tate's advice (ex, negging his partner so she won't leave him). Bonus points if the female partner is the main breadwinner, and the Tator Tot is unemployed, but not a stay at home husband who does chores/looks after the children. Bonus bonus points as when the female partner leaves, the Tator Tot then breaks down and begs for his ex back. I'd argue this is separate from the "baby switchup" because this is specifically about someone drastically changing their values due to an outside influence (Andrew Tate/his clones) as opposed to a specific event (a baby being born). 2) The Evil StepChild. While this does overlap with the Benevolent Step-Parent, where the stepparent is kind, loving, and follows boundaries, it specifically has the step-children aggressively rejecting not only any attempts of "being a family", but any attempts at a peaceful co-existence with the step-parent. This can be either long term (i.e., the child has always rejected their step-parent) or an acute incident (i.e., the step-parent and step-child previously had a good relationship, but the reintroduction of a biological, usually deadbeat, parent resulted in the step-child rejecting their parent). 3) Under the "unreasonable minorities", the "unreasonable abuse victim". This is when the subject of the post is very clearly being abused by someone, and said abuse is coloring their interactions with others. This is *not* when someone seems to act unreasonably and then is later revealed to have been abused; this is specifically when the OP knows or could reasonably assume this relationship is abusive, but does not seem to account for how that abuse could influence the abuse victim's interactions with others. Also, I would suggest renaming "Pop Psych Narcissism" to "Pop Psych Personality Disorder". While accusations of narcissism definitely are the most popular, I think bait about people with bipolar personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder can also be put under the PPN umbrella.
@@TenApplesforTime also see a lot of failure/refusal to understand what the golden child/scapegoat dichotomy actually means irl and acting as though it means one child is showered with love and gifts and the other is literally cinderella but worse
I'd argue that the Unreasonable Allergy and Unreasonable Vegan could both be lumped into the same category, call it "Unreasonable Dietary Restrictions". I've seen both kinds of posts and they tend to overlap in conflict but just have different reasons as to why they person can't eat that specific item. This new broader category would also be able to include religious dietary restrictions (see the post about a roommate not allowing OP to cook pork in the communal oven/microwave because of religious reasons).
That actually is how kosher laws work, although to my understanding it's only the cooking implements that need to not touch treyf (you could just buy and label your own sets) and I believe the oven and stovetop can have been used for treyf as long as they've been cleaned before you cook on them. Most Orthodox people I know just ask at restaurants that their food be cooked on a separate grill from where treyf foods are cooked if possible. It's basically as if you have an allergy to pork, I don't really get why accommodating an allergy would be reasonable but kosher isn't, although personally I'd just buy my own cookware and idk, an attachment for the stovetop to separate the food or something.
@leonardegan2883 "I really don't get why accommodating an allergy would be reasonable but kosher isn't" - I don't think asking for people to accommodate kosher is unreasonable, but it's not hard to understand why the standards of what's reasonable to ask for are different when failing to accommodate something properly could *literally kill someone*.
I think the thing that makes it hard for people to work out how many Reddit stories are really fake is that human behavior is extremely varied so that even the most implausible stories could be true- especially if they involve only a few people or a closed group (imo this is less true when it’s like, a group of strangers clapped after I did a cool thing!! but when it’s about interpersonal relationships or one person being odd or horrible, yes) BUT there is such a huge gulf between “a human being could and probably has done or experienced this” and “a human being who experienced this decided to write a Reddit post about it” and I think far fewer people understand this. I had a very strange experience that I briefly considered putting on Reddit because I kind of wanted to hear what other people thought of it but in the end I didn’t because a) it sounds extremely fake and b) if it blew up there was no way the other person involved wouldn’t recognize that I was talking about us. So I just, you know, didn’t make a Reddit post and instead there is exactly one friend in my life who knows about it and I’ll probably never tell the story again. This is, I think, the waaay more natural response to having a complicated interpersonal interaction. At least the not putting it on Reddit part. However we’ve all had experience with something that resembles an AITA post so they often feel very real. Really I think the value or point of these posts is mostly roll play. Here’s a situation what do you think is the correct response? Look at what other people consider the correct response. Like the questions at the back of a story in an English text book.
I love AITA’s description as “for the moral philosopher in all of us” because I think that’s exactly what these fake stories are all about. They’re basically thought experiments being set up by OP so that people can debate about them in the comments. I know I’m personally addicted to these types of posts because I’m not very adept at social dilemmas, so these role plays are like places for me to see analyses on what the acceptable course of action is. Unfortunately, it’s a bit like the blind leading the blind, so Reddit not the most optimal place to learn social cues/behavior lol 😂 I think the funniest part about Reddit stories is that, as you’ve said, it takes a certain type of person to post their real life on Reddit, so it’s always funny when the writer forgets that and has some crotchety 65 year old man who doesn’t know what a forum is ask stuff on r/relationships or AITA. Like, we’re gonna have to suspend some disbelief here and pretend that this old guy would know how to navigate AITA or r/relationships’s stringent posting policies. XD
It's why it's a lot easier to discuss AITA and related sub stories as less 'Give every story's credibility the benefit of the doubt' bc some bait is obvious or even word for word summaries of a tv show or book plot and more 'I'm giving my points in relation to this situation as it happens in real life and not bc I believe someone's 70 year old mom went to Reddit to expect random strangers to side with her poor treatment of her daughter in law' I also agree with the other commentor that Reddit isn't the best sample size for human behaviour or how to handle situations, esp with the 'You don't owe anyone anything ever' attitude being so prevalent that's ironically being combated with Tumblr's concept of the human tarpit considering its own prolific history with fake stories that have entertained people and also caused like long reaching harm to perceptions of different people.
i agree with the aita basically being role play. i have seen quite a few aita users say that they know most stories are fake, but enjoy pretending as if they are real for fun
@@user-kx5en8dg7uif you're not familiar with it, you may like r/nosleep! They're posts about fake horror events or stories, but the point of the subreddit is to interact with posts as if they're real things that happened.
@@allyli1718 Interesting. I've always struggled with social skills but I'm also really interested in why people people, so I closely analyzed human behaviour in schools and such for years in an effort to copy it (how do you do fellow hu-men) and apparently ended up teaching myself what nature refused to give me, since I've had multiple mental health professionals claim I have good social skills even if I still feel I don't. I guess that's the old-fashioned way for what you're doing 😄
This video made me think about one reddit comment I saw about a father's relationship with his very estranged children. Their mother was dead and he had fallen into hard times and with a bad crowd, so he gave his daughter to be adopted by a wealthy friend of her mother, and his son, to his stepbrother and his wife. It sounded completely real until the point where OP mentioned he had cut off his son's hand during a tense family reunion. Then I realized that the author was effectively describing Darth Vader
My mother (57F) almost caused a car crash because I (31NB) recently came out as genderfluid A few weeks ago, my mother said I'll always be her daughter, and in a moment of bravery, I told her that actually, sometimes I'm her daughter, sometimes her son and sometimes something in between. My mother accepted this, and fast forward to yesterday My mom calls me while my sister was driving her, and my mom asks if, instead of calling me her daughter, she should just call me her offspring. My sister, taken off-guard, laughed so hard she almost lost control of the vehicle and had to pull off to the side of the road. AITA?
My favorite AITA posts are within fandom subreddits where fans will make up AITA stories from the POV of characters. Just as fictional as any other AITA post but way more fun for me 😅
Maybe things have changed since I used to peruse AITA but I found reddit to be harsher on parents than the childfree folks most of the time. A lot of "How dare those damn entitled parents ask you to accommodate them somewhat when THEY are the ones that chose to have a stupid baby" type energy
I am always impressed at the amount of research Li does and how articulate she is. I've seen other video essays where a lot of people try to be pseudo intellectual but can't form a full sentence and get their point across. It's inspiring
27:20 I’d personally say Reddit is about 50/50 on the issue of pit bulls, with people either saying they’re inherently evil monsters or that they’re inherently angelic babies. Which means pit bull bait posts are a hellscape of arguing I would never wish on anyone
The best Reddit fake stories are from paranormal subreddits. Like yes Reddit, give me my weird knocking sounds and lights flickering and seeing weird shadows!! Edit: I liked this video so much, I think it would be interesting to see a paranormal version! Some ideas for the categories and subcategories: - Shadow people - Peeking ghost - Definitely sleep paralysis - Weird dreams - Electrical issues - Orbs - Experiences that involve a creature/entity from a culture OP has probably not researched enough (very common with w*ndigo and s*inw*lker posts)
Unreasonable living: a ghost is just trying to...die their death?...but the mortals redecorate their place and won't give them any personal space or peace and quiet.
It's fun to search for mentions of your hometown/childhood hangouts on those subs. Won't get a hit on all of them, but when you do it is funny seeing someone like "Holy shit don't go to [x] in the middle of the night!!! I almost got possessed by a ghost!!!!!!" and it's a place you hung around all the time at night when you were like 12. I grew up in Appalachia so it's especially common for me to see this, I spent plenty of time in the woods at night with friends or family and not been possessed once
@melvinof129 I don't think they mean that these creatures wouldn't attack non-native people. Rather that the "author" uses the name without finding out enough about how said creature is supposed to work, and makes silly mistakes. In an actual fictional story, you can pick and choose traits for your monsters; you should, really, makes it more interesting. But in a fake story that is meant to be read as if it was real, you probably want to find out what is accepted as hard, real-life canon, and use that. Like if someone wrote about a vampire that doesn't have fangs. In a book, fine, in a post, silly.
@@molluscumlore I'm from the Midwest, so there's a lot of stuff about my state in particular. I can confirm it is pretty creepy. But most of the paranormal experiences I've had could be explained away by my cats doing weird stuff.
The increasingly dishevelled look is amazing not only as a visual gag but also as a demonstration of what happens to your mental health after being on Reddit for too long
Under Childfree category (and if this is covered in another category just ignore), there is Childfree Person Dating/Marrying Single Parent. Usually split between Childfree Person wants absolutely nothing to do with the kids despite marrying the parent, or the parent pulls a SURPRISE KIDS on the childfree person. Bonus if the single parent suddenly gets full custody of the kids because their ex died with no warning.
In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the son came back to beg his father to just let him work among the servants and laborers, just enough to survive. But the father welcomed him as a son and restored him in his house. The son was not entitled in the parable, at that point.
One thing that I’ve seen on Reddit that seems disturbingly common is the: “I hate my [x] (usually a child, son, daughter, sibling ect.) who is [y] ([y] HAS to be a disability of some sort. Usually autism or ADHD)
I saw “make a story up on aita and whoever gets the most likes wins” as a challenge once and someone got several thousand likes and hundreds of comments. People just do it to entertain themselves
Same. Like sure logically I know that people can and do lie, I just never assume that's what's going on. I guess I just don't get the thrill of having hundreds of people comment, believe and share you're made-up story, it would feel completely hollow to me because it's fake. It's like pretending to be someone else to get friends
This is so well made, thank you.. Aita is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I get kind of tired seeing the same tropes word for word repeated. Anytime I see "now everyone is blowing up my phone calling me an a-hole" or "my partner wont talk to me for no reason! Update: okay yes I told them to die in a fire, i dont see how its relevant??" I just roll my eyes... I dont mind the fake nature of aita, its the uncreativity that gets me down. That, and people being absolutely unhinged in the comments on obviously fake posts.
Honestly i would love to see so much deep dive content on reddit. Another thing ive noticed on reddit is that a lot of the posting base (users who post) are very ... mean and narrow minded. Like especially for stupid things like your favorite ways of dressing or what you did today, if you go against the hive mind (which is never clearly defined) people get downright nasty. People can also be very toxically negative to the point where if you havent felt the same then you must be lying. Idk. I used to be close in a few communities of which i identify with the traits, but ive slowly stopped using reddit recently because it felt like i was being debated on for not having a wholly negative view on my life. I dont know how to say more without doxxing myself or revealing things on this account that i dont want to. Anyways, it seems to me that these experiences for me are unique to reddit. I've not experienced things like this anywhere else, especially not in real life.
I’ve definitely felt that way, people are very pedantic on there about grammar and spelling and stuff and I feel like that maps on very easily to an “im objectively right” kind of attitude
It depends on where you hang out. If you’re in a subreddit for something like video games (or even just one for just a singular popular game) or one for politics, for example, yeah you’re gonna have a bad time. People are cruel and mean because they want to be. But if you hang out in smaller, niche communities or funny cat subreddits people are pretty chill and nice.
I think this has a few causes, primary being the relative anonymity of reddit. Until recently, it was very much not a site where you would ever use your real name or have a real profile picture. It used to be that you didn't even need an email address to make a reddit account. It's a lot easier to be an a-hole when what you're saying isn't directly linked to you. This feeds into the secondary factor, the founding culture of the site. It was created as an anonymous, barely-moderated message board for people with specific interests. That combination is a breeding ground for strongly held opinions expressed without regard for social graces. Plus, the upvote/downvote/karma system is a social credit scheme that actively rewards people for conforming to a group. There's some cool things about reddit, but the overall site culture unfortunately isn't one of them.
@@GhostsMcGee on forums of the old people didn't attach their real names or real pictures and nobody was nasty, while on facebook people post most vile shit imaginable with their real identities attached, so I don't think it's the anonymity.
@@AliceLoverdrive I feel like Reddit has actually become more toxic as it has become more mainstream, tbh. Because now the toxicity is coming from professional bad actors, AI, corporations, and hostile governments.
you forgot my personal favorite “light switch surprise” where OP suspects partner is doing something strange (usually cheating) and OP waits for them to come home late at night then turns on the light right as they come home and confront them.
Unreasonable expert - I think you included teacher, but while this could be associated with any expert who mansplains or is incorrect about something, what pops into my mind is a dismissive doctor who writes a patient's serious illness off as just needing to lose weight (or sleep more, etc) until they get a second opinion.
@@mykaruest3620every fake reddit story takes cues from actual events or else nobody will take the bait. A lifetume original movie is a full on assault of tropes v women, that doesn't mean it's a real story. Every fucki g liar ever has taken a kernal of truth and extrapolated it into a false narrative.
Loved that the censors are snippets of Cbat 😭 also people on Reddit who make posts simply for the creative writing factor completely disrespect those who may have gone through similar experiences (referencing to abuse/death OR death of someone/or situations that just should not be taken lightly) ESPECIALLY if they take it to serious Reddits and get real advice from people genuinely concerned
I tend to just believe most of the Realistic category posts unless they're posted in a suspiciously targeted fashion (for example, the lesbian subs I'm on getting flooded with unreasonable trans person stories) but this is a great taxonomy of the Maybe+ categories.
1:00:21 i love this "remember to get some water" reminder so much but i can't describe why. it's such a friendly and warming reminder amidst of this one-hour long summary of terrible fictions.
I’m seated. The theater employees are scared and asking me to leave because it’s ‘a RUclips video, you can watch at home’ but I’m simply too seated
too seated 😭😭
same
They don't understand the gravity of this video.
I so wish I could rent out a little theater for watching youtube vids
@@aileenmorgan8276 I mean... you can, its just costs a lot lol
killing two birds with one stone: avoiding saying child abuse and rhyming with misogyny by using “poor treatment of progeny” was genius
i was wondering what the fuck that meant
AITA for killing two birds with one stone?
@@manboy4720 NTA, the birds killed your 3 month old infant in the womb
@@TheMoonlight1711 its true.
When I saw the "Mother in law" trope, the biggest smile came across my face. The dramatic fake in-laws trope has to be my favorite. It reminds me of the indian dramas I used to watch when I was younger lmao. The way the mothers are so cartoonishly evil and the way the characters talk to each other feels like something out of a netflix drama.
Oh my goodness YES, my friend in high school and I would watch Indian and Turkish soaps and the evil MIL is a gold standard!!!!!
I, 19F live in Pakistan with my in-laws. My MIL (45F) gets mad at me for not cleaning or doing enough house chores even though I cook every single meal and clean the entire house every single day. She also makes a point to get mad at me in front of my husband (27M) who then gets mad at me without even hearing me out. His second wife (21F) hates my guts and wants me dead. She gave me a cup of tea that when I sipped it, made me woozy and I woke up in a hospital bed and my MIL yelled at me for 20 months about the hospital bills. My FIL (55M) goes along with everything my MIL says. My only friend betrayed me by getting with the guy I actually wanted to marry (This marriage i’m in currently is arranged), and my mother and sisters don’t know anything because I don’t want to tell them anything because they’ll worry. I don’t talk back to anyone, I do what everyone in the house asks me to do, but I cry myself to sleep every night and somehow still wake up with shimmery orange eye makeup and glossy lips. AITA? What do I do? :,(
@@sta._rinaBRUH LMAOOO
@@sta._rina LMAO
LOL
On the infidelity topic, shoutout to that one story about the wife who suspected her husband was having an affair but he was actually just secretly a huge hatsune miku fan
😂 I haven’t seen that one. I’ll have to look for it.
That actually seems to be a unique category too: Jealous girlfriend assumes her man is cheating on her when he's actually been doing something perfectly innocent or even outright altruistic like letting his homeless male friend who just so happens to have long hair use their shower before job interviews causing the girlfriend to find the hairs in the drain and assume the worst. Not exactly ragebait since these stories always end with a wholesome twist, but did you ever notice that it's almost always the *female* partner who ends up looking foolish for assuming such a thing about the good frickin' guy she's pulled? Whenever there's a gender discrepancy like that, it makes sense to question why that is. Can this discrepancy be *reasonably* explained by physical and social differences between men and women or is it more likely that the story is written to simply play into certain ideas and preconceived notions of what men and women are like that happen to be common on sites like Reddit?
And reasonably, after the last million Reddit memes that go like:
Woman: "I bet he's thinking about other girls!!1!"
Man: *actually thinking of something quirky and perfectly innocent*
I'm thinking the latter option is far more likely.
@@rainpooper7088also the fact those stories fail to mention how the boyfriend/husband really could have just communicated to their spouse what is going on instead of sneaking around and letting them assume the worst. At that point it isnt her fault she thought you were cheating you were letting some dude she doesnt know shower in your shared house and never told her 💀
^ yes yes yes.....
also that one where the guy was worried his wife was cheating on him after he found her open diary where she was talking about another man but said another man was actually alucard from castlevania
i hope these threads now have an influx of comments like "2BS" "1M"
Was NOT expecting Yakko's Trigger Warnings at the beginning
Me neither but its pure art
@@frauleinfunf "And now, the Trigger Warnings of Reddit, brought to you by Yakko Warner."
That was the best part lol
a great parody of a great song
Did NOT expect you to list off the content warnings like that one countries song
was expecting her to slide "portugal" in the list
GEW AAAAAAHM@@bronzergoth7598
that went SO HARD too
44:09
We can now finally confirm that Li is a Warner sibling.
The ragebait on Reddit was so obvious to me once I saw that the intended "assholes" in almost every story happen to be little kids, sometimes even babies under a year old, disabled people, pregnant women, people struggling with very bad illnesses, inmigrants, foreigners, vegans, etc. Of course anyone can be an asshole, but since I've noticed the pattern of who the asshole is supposed to be on these stories I stopped believing everything I read.
Plus: the infidelity stories on heterosexual relationships when the woman is the one doing the cheating is more of an opportunity for men to "get it all out" if you know what I mean.
reminds me of all those fake tumblr posts (like the down with cis bus) that were actually made by this one guy on reddit.
I think bc of that, offshoots like r/AmITheDevil(Crosspost sub for posts where the person writing it/the persona in the story is the obvious asshole regardless of judgement in the inital sub) seem to target posts that obviously try to frame a marginalized person as the unreasonable person or call posts bait more frequently since AITA apparently gets pretty militant with how some comments are phrased.
@@mariedit9935 this. Despite the fact that men statically cheat more
I how Can a baby be the asshole 😭 it’s baby??? These people need to write better
One sub category for Death would be "Funeral Misbehaving." For example:
"AITA for going to my ex mistress's funeral?"
"AITA for playing a fart noise on my phone as my dad's coffin was being lowered?"
Jill Rodrigues’s selfie with the parents of the deceased children at a funeral that she wasn’t even invited to in the first place comes to mind
Aside from the obvious bigotry bait ("oh, x-ism is okay because [insert marginalized person here] was a big jerk"), one wonders why these people don't just write soap operas.
probably oversaturation of soap operas on the market lol
it's like the easiest fiction to write, except maybe something directed at children
Simple. Nobody watches Soap Operas.
NOT CBAT FOR CENSORING OMG 😭😭😭😭😭
So there's a streamer I watch who has Cbat in his playlist because of the meme and I've started associating the song with him, so remembering the origins was like a sucker punch.
glad im not the only one who noticed 💀
it's like a mosquito fart 😭
I thought that was an airhorn lol
I can hear the song in my brain lol
I love how her outfit becomes increasingly more disheveled as the video progresses 😭
It's giving Brian David Gilbert when he was still at polygon
“wanna cyber” tanktop had me audibly laughing until i cried. I NEEED ONE
Absolutely inspirational costuming. It felt like a little treat for actually watching the video instead of leaving it on in the background.
the only things missing are a little lecturer's stand and a bottle of water that they're sipping from for the span of 2 hours
@@vogelvrouw or that one woman on TikTok who sang "what a wonderful world" one letter at a time.
never forget that Oppa Homeless Style originated from a subReddit about Tumblr cringe or something and was never a real Tumblr fake story. sidenote please do this with Tumblr fake stories next
The majority of infamous Tumblr fake stories were made up by reddit
It'd be a good collab topic w/ Strange Aeons
Omg! Really? Always thought it was a tumblr originalb
@@summerchild_ yep! Sarah Z has a pretty good video talking about the history, search for the original post and realization it was never a real post but that's why if you've ever seen it in the wild it only exists as screenshots
@summerchild_ there are a lot of iconic tumblr posts that upon further inspection were just made up by people on reddit trying to find excuses to hate anyone who wasn’t a skinny cishet male. In the video rachalt mentioned one of the people who made one of those aforementioned posts ran away scared after being confronted lol
The fact that I didn’t realize these weren’t real Reddit posts until the one about removing ladders from the pool is proof of how accurate this video is
I was halfway in until I noticed the 'SampleOP' 😭
Under pets, you missed "fake service animal". Surprised that it didn't come up in the search! It's when someone either tries to pass off an obviously untrained dog as their service dog, or tries to bring some other animal everywhere with them under the excuse of "emotional support animal" (which AFAIK is not legally a thing anywhere)
I do belive support animals exist but theyre usually therapy dogs of some kind and I think still need some sort of paper proof?
Emotional support animals are a thing in some places - in the US, an ESA can't legally be denied in non-pet rented housing, but they are absolutely not allowed in non-pet friendly stores or other public places, for example. They're not a thing in the UK, though, and thus ends my knowledge of the legal status of ESAs around the world
Unfortunately that's one I do frequently see in real life. I cannot tell you how often people advise others to lie about an animal being an ESA. It's so frustrating because it makes things so much harder for people who actually need service animals and ESAs.
And yes, as the other commenter said, ESAs are a legal thing in the US. It allows people to keep an animal that provides emotional comfort for things like depression and anxiety even in housing units that don't normally allow pets, and potentially get a pet deposit waived (however it must be considered as reasonable, so if the animal causes damage, disturbs others, or causes logistical issues, the person may still be told no or be asked to remove the animal). It requires documentation from someone like a doctor or therapist and (as far as I am aware) only applies to housing. ESAs are not considered service animals and are still not allowed in places that do not allow pets. Also in the US the only animals that can be considered service animals are dogs and, in some states, miniature horses. An ESA can be any animal.
Reddit has a serious hateboner for ESAs in particular. I'd call "disruptive ESA" posts Type 2 because they're almost always told from the perspective of the complainer and the owner of the animal is voted the a-hole. Usually cartoonish BS, but the tamer ones could be real.
As someone who worked in retail for a few years (thank God that I'm out), I've never seen a well-behaved ESA and only seen entitled people who brought in untrained dog(s)
I feel like you just compiled the internets Grimm fairy tales. Like I used to see the internet as a library, but now I see it as being able to speedrun walking up to a stranger in the woods and listening to his wild tale by campfire
comparing ragebait stories to grimm fairy tales omggg 😭😭
Because that is exactly what this is! Culture is still alive and evolving, history is happening right now. We witness the creation of Li's Rage Tales.
I mean, folklorists have made detailed trope taxonomies for fairy tales just like what Li did for Reddit stories.
this is such a great way to describe it
my favorite type M post was one about an argument over a "fictional character" where it was later revealed that OP was lying about everyone's age and had gotten in a discord slapfight with their fellow middle schoolers about the dream SMP
That sounds *hilarious*, and if youre willing to either share it or retell any more details I'd be delighted
@@guggelguggel7491 the story itself was rather generic, but the way OP described being an adult and danced around the "fictional story" sort of tipped people in the comments off and when pushed they admitted they lied about that but the rest was real. pressed further and they revealed the fictional character they were fighting about was "dream from the dream smp". i think the funniest part is that this was clearly a 13 year old looking for a judgement call about their actions but still had some awareness to know that fighting over a minecraft server was ridiculous.
Oh my god, sauce ?
I haven’t heard about the dream smp in so long…
41:55 I think I know an example of that one, but I can't put both my broken arms on it
Or on my peblis
This was great and all but I lost focus because there wasn't any bad Subway Surfers footage playing in the background while text to speech tells me about how OP's wife kidnapped the beanie babies and her mother is making her burn them so they can spread the ashes in Disneyworld
mini trope: absurdly tragic, where bad things keep getting piled onto one character-- ex: teen mom is left at the alter by abusive boyfriend, gets her baby kidnapped by unreasonable family member, and then gets cancer and dies in a car crash on the way to custody battle.
I love how your pants almost blend into the background so when I unfocus my eyes I can pretend you're a floating torso with a comically long tie
I was thinking the same thing. Excellent character design
This was fantastic!!!!
**suggested category I've seen a lot of: tampered food. mostly consisting of 1. someone trying to sneak meat into a vegan/vegetarian OP's food OR
2. someone trying to feed OP their allergen to "test" OP's allergy or force them to "build tolerance" OR 3. someone is repeatedly trying to sneak something disliked or gross into OP's food
I've heard so much of this real irl and on potentially ragebait posts. I remember one where the christian in-laws of a jewish kosher man secretly fed him, and his kosher children, pork, and the wife was making excuses for the parents
Number 2 kinda reminded me of a story on Reddit where a woman puts coconut product in the child's hair after they been constantly told by the mother that the child was deathly allergic to coconut.
@@asapling OMGG YES. that was so awful!!!
To be honest, as a person of arab descent, amount of times I was "tricked" into eating pork makes me believe these stories ain't fake. Or at least some of them aren't.
can't forget putting something someone would likely not want to eat (ex: laxatives, painfully spicy, sedative, thc, etc) in food that keeps being stolen, usually in a work setting or shared living space.
Sampleop has so much going on in their life..
or at least they used to, infinity hours ago.
Oh yo, i actually know SampleOP irl, thats my buddy eric
@@donutholebandit6212 Everything's always coming up Eric.
Even worse, half the ragebait today is bots copying old posts, which is in itself enraging! (also i love the squeak sound effect when you curse, it's so cute)
Its cbat 😭😭😭
@@number420dadI KNEW IT
Oh god yeah it got even worse when Chat GPT entered the picture
But why? isn't the fun in rage bait is tricking others? If a robot does the work for you then it kinda takes away the reason to do it in the first place
@@seraphim108 probably for algorithm reasons idk
Screw the posts, can we talk about how utterly unhinged the rules/mods are? There'a rule against posting about interpersonal conflict, against posting asking if your feelings make you an asshole, one forbidding about posting about bodily autonomy, one against posting about abuse. All the rules are stupid and vague and are routinely broken. But the mods constantly delete GOOD posts that are getting engagement, and arbitrarily enforce these completely subjective rules when their fee-fees get hurt or they disagree with someone. I VERY politely DMed the mods asking for clarification on a rule and they were SO incredibly rude I was genuinely embarrassed for them, which is really, really saying something, as most reddit mods are fairly awful.
The top 200 subreddits are modded by the same, like, 3 mods. They're obviously tyrants; they don't have any reason to be nice to you, peasant. It has turned Reddit into an echo-chamber where you aren't allowed to wrong-think and you sure as he'll better not point it out nor complain about it. I realized how terrible it's become after the whole Aimee Challengor fiasco. (Where people were getting banned for mentioning Challengor's father's being arrested for keeping a 7 year old girl tied up in his house, doing all the terrible things you imagine, WHILE HE WAS CHALLENGOR'S CAMPAIGN MANAGER. Yes, Aimee was living in the home at the time and no, Aimee did not tell anyone. About anything.)
It was a whole thing.
Yeah man what kind of a psycho voluntarily polices anything for free
"Unreasonable asexual" is still pretty rare just because asexuality isn't that well known, but I've noticed it starting to pop up in toxic romance and dead bedroom stories
in my experience asexual people tend to be extremely kinky, so i find it odd
Oh yeah, those are especially fun because, most of the time, both the poster and the commenters clearly know little to nothing about asexuality or asexual people.
@@sushiroll3795 Yeah, for some people it's a foreign concept that a lot of asexuals do enjoy sex for example, since it's lack of attraction to gender rather than lack of libido/voluntary celibacy
It's a lack of physical attraction to any gender.
I tend to explain it like say you see a really pretty flower, you think "wow, that's a pretty flower"
But you aren't compelled to have sex with the flower.
I think of people the same way people think about flowers.
I can appreciate their beauty but that's as far as that goes.
@@SerenityBugify I'm just gonna put these tulips down...
Finally. I feel like I’m going crazy with how often there are posts with 20k upvotes that are CLEARLY FAKE ragebait yet everyone takes seriously. Ugh. Like at this point just make a “fake story rage” subreddit, like r/nosleep so we can have fun. I love the idea of creating a tvtropes for this shit so people are aware. Hopefully this’ll help people 😭😭
There’s r/AmITheAngel.
The crazy thing is as an orphan who actually has tried to share their story, I feel like I’ve never gotten attention when reaching out for help over fake stories. And they’re so obviously fake too. Like they don’t know if you ask them questions about it or answer super vaguely and people eat it up anyway. It’s really frustrating especially when I was trying to find scholarships, or when I wanted to know other peoples coping mechanisms/ways to adjust to different homes and there were dozens of dozens of spam fake sad/happy orphan stories and only some real ones 🫥 Like it’s not even the big subreddits it even leaks into places where you’re actually looking for resources!
@@thegoodwitchluzura i LOVE that place. truly a gift to earth
Yes! Nosleep is great because we know it's fake but we pretend it isn't and it works.
When I first came across the subreddit, AITA posts legitimately made me worry that everyone other than me was living in a cinderella hellish landscape where step-families just hate you and abuse you constantly. Or that its unrealistic, and the worst thing in the world that only horrible monsters would want, for a step parent who raised you since you were three to want to be considered your mother/father.
You are reminding me of my all time fave post: AITA for cutting my step daughter's hair against her will because I don't want her to be vain and having short hair will free up more of her time for doing chores?
Some posts are def fake but there’s def some that are real and the real ones are a spectrum. Saw one earlier where a woman talked about smacking a random child across the face cuz he was trying to take off her bikini top and her AITA question was about her husband saying she kinda overreacted
AITA is either the most mundane non-issue or a reason to call 911, no in-between.
@@SilverlineXZeroand the 911 one is written with the tone and casualness of a mundane one (AITA was i overreacting for not wanting to talk to a mutual friend after they slightly murdered my whole family?) and the mundane one is written with like a whole villain plot line and drama
@@julieblair7472I remember this one. I was torn between believing them or not. Because my mom used to cut my hair against my will because I have African type hair (we’re both African but we’re North African so our hair can vary) and she didn’t want to deal with it.
In college I wrote an essay for my writing capstone called something like *The Social Function of r/AmITheAsshole* basically discussing the societal role of AITA as a genre. If this video had existed back then I absolutely would have quoted and cited it.
I would love to see that essay adapted into a video essay
i wanna see that essay now
Dropping a comment here in case u wanna share the essay cause I wanna read it
i wanma see that essay!!
drop the essay babe I would love to read that
You should ABSOLUTELY do a follow-up for Quora. That site is FILLED TO THE BRIM with ragebait questions. It wouldnt be as long a video since its just questions, but still, itd be really funny
Edit: it seems like the categories would be the same. I think a short commenting on it would be cool though!
This counts as “unreasonable trans person,” but I’ve noticed a weird subcategory of “you can’t have my deadname,” where a trans person gets mad at a cis person for having the same name as the trans person’s deadname. It sure is a weird category, considering I’ve never seen this happen.
Edit: It's worth noting I've seen this story a couple of times now, but I don't know exactly how prevalent it is, considering I don't browse these subreddits.
I saw one reposted on tiktok a while back that was the exact opposite (except the trans party was still protrayed as unreasonable and for some reason oprepeatedly emphasized that the trans person was autistic despite that not having anything to do with it)
There was one I saw once that was literally just a children's book plot. It was like "AITA for causing my friend to shave her head because she keeps copying me?" and only like one or two other people in the comments pointed out that it was just the plot to Stephanie's Ponytail by Robert Munsch
AITA for tricking my entire school into shaving their heads because they all just made a pastime out of hating me for whatever reason?
AITA for leaving my abusive aunts without telling them to live inside a giant peach
@@alicethemad1613 EDIT: Ok yeah the peach ran them over but
I've once seen an AITA where OP spent a holiday in a creepy village and then yelled at his uncle when he learned his great-grandma was from this village because what if OP "becomes like them".
I repeat, someone deadass posted "The Shadow over Innsmouth" to reddit as a true story.
i remember that one! i didn't know it was a book plot. people really seemed to believe that one
One thing I have become absolutely certain of over my years of being chronically online is that most every moral panic/stupid discourse about like gay or neurodivergent or leftist or whatever topic started as a reddit or 4chan or kiwifarms ragebait/trolling operation. It’s really hard to get younger people in those communities to ignore the bait and move on and right wing grifters loveeeee picking up on these for there own benefit.
Agree with the sentiment but i think this is more a general social media problem. Twitter and tumblr have their fair share of hate bandwagons to account for as well. Also a lot of this 2010s culture war/ragebait stuff was pushed further by Russian bots trying to create a divide in the American public. I don't think half of those right wing grifters would have said those things, if they hadn't been radicalized by that self same rhetoric, but im probably giving them too much credit.
The gay or neurodivergent or leftist writers are generally encouraged to write fanfiction and the conservative writers had no equivalent until Reddit stories came in vogue except maybe 4chan greentexts
It literally always goes back to 4chan/8chan/8kun/whatever silly new name they're calling themselves in order to scurry away from the spotlight and back under the rock they came from. Really at it's core it's a subset of some of the most bitter, sad, dejected losers on the planet coming together to sow whatever negativity they can because it's the only thing they have left to feel anything.
@@psyivy9169 true
This vastly overestimate the organisational capabilities of the users on those sites, who are often too busy (figuratively) cannibalising each other with infighting to get themselves involved in even targeted operations against one person, never mind entire social media sites. It's very easy for people's social media peers to exploit their gullibility and propensity for e-rage just for the sake of "doing a little trolling" on an individual basis.
36:22 The Beanie Baby example made me laugh. Especially because there is a real life photo of a divorced couple splitting up Beanie Babies.
that running gag was 100% inspired by that photo.
LEAVE THE BABIES OUT OF THIS, TED
This was hilarious. Before I quit reading Reddit I noticed the ‘angelic OP’ thing for sure- either the title makes OP seem like a monster then the text has them behaving angelically, or the title is the most innocuous thing possible and it turns out the OP kicks puppies as a hobby. Both are equally fake and possibly also fetish bait.
I’m not even 15 minutes in and every time you bring up one of these seemingly super niche categories I realize I’ve read dozens of stories with that premise. Unreal how fake these Reddit stories actually are.
I (35, M), my girlfriend (33, F), her brother (33, M), and my best friend from college (36, M) were all bored one day so we decided to hijack a rocket ship and take a trip into space. Everything was going smoothly until we were exposed to strange cosmic radiation. When we landed, we realized that we developed fantastic new abilities. I could stretch my body into any form, my girlfriend could turn invisible and create force fields, and her brother could turn into a blaze of fire and fly into the air. However my best friend from college got a new rocky body, which he hated. He said that he “made him feel like a monster” and “I can’t pilot a plane like this!” I told him that it was an accident and hew knew the risks. He said that it was my fault for bring him along something so dangerous. AITA?
Thank you so much for writing this out I am obsessed
not to nickpick, but um actually Sue and Johnny are different ages and Johnny is always depicted as younger than everyone else! He's been as young as 18ish and attending college, at least when they first debuted! love the way you wrote this tho!
nta your trip your rules
@@deaf-tomcat Yeah, Johnny and Peter met in college if I'm not mistaken, and both already had superhero identities by then.
OPITA, you should’ve checked the ship for any way you could’ve been exposed to weird cosmic radiation before stealing it, and you should’ve swapped bodies with your friend, you’re clearly just being selfish about keeping cool powers
I was going to start this and watch it in pieces throughout the week on my work breaks but then I accidentally just watched the entire thing start to finish in one sitting
Love ur videos
Omg tama, i literally came to this video right after watching your pokemon colosseum video! Thanks for great listening material while i play pokemon!!
She went feral
I did the opposite... fell asleep half way thru
You’ve missed one sub-branch of Last wishes ignored/ inheritance dispute: when the last wish of the dying is to give all their money to their (still small) kid, but one or multiple older family members decide to take the money instead; which the kid usually only finds out about once they’re about to go off to college
I’m not sure if it counts as its own separate category but one of my favorite types of posts is where the general consensus is “you’re not an asshole in this situation, but it does seem like you’re an asshole in many other areas of life”
Honestly, redditors accusing me every time I opened up on there of lying for "karma" made me delete that shit so fast. Whether or not other people spread fake stories, assuming everyone you talk to is lying to you is such an unhealthy mindset to adopt. And trying to give yourself a voice just for a bunch of randoms to try and take it away immediately just feels like self harm.
It's such a shame dealing with fake stories and trying to find the real ones. It figures that when a story is real people call it fake but when the story is painfully fake it blows up and everyone believes it. Before I deleted Reddit together (partially because of, imo, clearly rage bait stories that do litter the site and outnumber the real ones) I made a post about how I have trust issues and anxiety because of my dad cheating on my mom and their subsequent divorce. And instead of getting help or tips on how to deal with it, people said I was lying for attention or that I was overblowing my anxiety. I just deleted the post out of frustration after about a week.
i appreciate that you deal with youtube's censorship by just censor-beeping the word, rather than replacing it with some absurd substitute. i'm so tired of people saying shit like "seggs" and "unalive".
Yeah the only time I think it's reasonable to do the substitute thing is when you'll have to repeat the word very often because of the type of video it is and even then it can often be avoided
It works well for some videos, though I've had a lot of videos where I am only listening and it's extremely difficult to figure out the different words being thrown out when they're only ever censored. It's mostly detrimental when directly quoting a lot of info from people who didn't give context clues since they just said the words directly. Those times, I do appreciate some sort of substitute. Explaining a simple acronym or abbreviation before using them is something I've enjoyed in videos like that.
do people actually censor like that outside of tiktok?
@@homosexula5595 the systematic replacement using the word "unalive" is so widespread it's becoming a normal part of children's lexicons. listen to any podcast that also gets released on youtube, which is a lot of them these days.
@@linkin2363yep it evolved from being a way to censor specific to the internet. To just a new word used by teens and young adults.
would like to add to unreasonable abled person: the “handicap spot” where the disabled OP is accused of not needing a handicap parking spot, often by old people. i would bet a good number of them are true unfortunately but i see this one a lot. very specific but could be broadened to “you’re not disabled” ; also to unreasonable minority, there’s the unreasonable picky eater (often overlapping with unreasonable autistic) especially when the picky eater is described as being spoiled or has an incredibly specific restriction.
As an autistic who has the most support needs in my food sensory issues the last one you mentioned always is most upsetting to me. People are so ableist and have the weirdest cultural obsession with eating food = polite and turning down food = impolite. It has ruined relationships for me.
When it's not a parking spot, it's a mobility device.
@@asmrtpop2676I’m so glad that my dad has finally stopped trying to force me to eat foods I don’t like. I’m not *the* pickiest eater, but I’ve got a fair share of texture related issues when it comes to food. Specifically with pasty or gritty things like mashed potatoes, grits, and certain soups. It makes me nauseous, even if I like the flavour of the foods. My dad started understanding this a lot more in my later teens, and now he’ll make me alternate dishes/sides if I want them if he knows he’s going to be preparing something I don’t like. Or simply make those foods on nights where I’m at work, and save the ones I enjoy for days I’m home.
I’m also extremely non-adventurous when it comes to eating at restaurants- whether it’s ones I know, or new ones. I’ll always stick to something I know I like, because it’s reassuring and I know I’m gonna be able to eat it. I have set orders at every single sit down and fast food restaurant I go to regularly and never stray from those orders. My extended family members are a lot more critical of this than my parents.
‘And not algorithmically nuke my channel’ Li I cannot tell you how excited I was when I saw the title
Ditto
Same I love categories SO MUCH but I’ve never seen this channel before so… I’m maybe irrelevant
Omg the huge age gaps with the op not wanting the discuss it are soooo frequent in my experience, i operate on the basis that all stories are fake/ragebait but there are so many posts like "my (18F) boyfriend (48M) ....." and then alll the comments being about the obvious age gap with the op reacting to everything like "i didn't ask for advice about the ages" i just like browsing the subreddits when i'm bored sometimes but the posts have become so extremely repetitive it's just not fun anymore
I am 37 mins in and the fact I’ve read a post that fits every category thus far has totally convinced me 99% of the posts I read are probably fake AND that I spend too much time on Reddit
micro categories for trans: trans sibling steals intended baby name of op or chooses the same name as op. usually a sibling.
yes! i was thinking of this one! ive also seen “trans person gets mad at someone else for having their deadname” but idk if thats as much of a category in itself
I've seen the latter post word for word before lmao
@@Elena-vx8pu I've seen some of these online and are such obvious bigoted rage-bait if you know any trans people IRL.
Hahaha I actually did that irl, took the same name as one of my cousin's kids. But like, it's a nice name and if she didn't want me to steal it she should have learned to talk earlier.
You know what's crazy? Just yesterday I saw a podcast on RUclips where some woman (she showed her face) was angry about her trans sister & the "trans agenda".
One of the points she made was that she's angry that the trans sister named her daughter with the same name as her sibling
This video inspired me to write the rules for a fictional subreddit called "r/FanFicAITA" where it's just fanfic of characters posting to "r/AITA" since AITA is mostly fictional stories anyway. Not... that I'm ever going to actually make a subreddit for that, but I thought it'd be a fun idea.
This reminds me of a tumblr blog that's called "aita-blorbos" which is basically what you described, fictional characters posting to aita (how it's set up is that people submit posts and the person running the blog will post it, so you still get quite a bit of variety for media).
OOOOO @@Mizu_Melon
there's actually a real subreddit where people post in character as their sims, i think it's called r/aitasims, it's hilarious
Oh actually!! r/FictionalAITA already exists and it's a blast I tell you
Perfect for those "I [23M] had an argument about politics with my brother-teacher-dad [38M] over an active volcano and now my pregnant wife [28F] is dead AITA?" posts lmao
@@Mizu_Melon I WAS ABOUT TO SAY THE SAME THING
Idiot tourist story that I witnessed was an American lady asking a Mexican store clerk how much something cost in "real money." Reddit didn't exist back then but this was amazing
Describing these subreddits as "stealth creative writing subreddits" is honestly the greatest thing I've ever heard. I don't even think that's a burn-- they're essentially built around workshopping your ability to get an emotional reaction.
I should do that
@@kloa4219what's gonna happen is your story will get a little attention, the mods will remove it and repost with more red meat on an alt account.
My favourite micro category of 'Name Shaming' is 'Fictional Character Name Shaming'. Godspeed to all the Daeneryses out there.
This exactly! One weeaboo decides to name their son Goku, and all of the sudden, everyone on Reddit is dogpiling on them.
And most of the time it's just... a name. A name that 'muricans don't encounter often, but still, just a name.
I just have to believe that the post where a couple named their twins Aziraphale and Crowley is real just because it is SO FUCKING FUNNY AAA
And who can forget the classic "Partner named our child after an ex, without informing me at the time".
@@AliceLoverdrivethe funniest thing to me is when the "ridiculous name" is literally just French
Li getting progressively more disheveled throughout the video really just enhances the whole experience
i saw a misgendering freakout post on r/doordash once that was the most reasonable shit ever. the person politely corrected the op (delivery driver) on their pronouns and the driver politely corrected themself, and then went on reddit and acted like this was a horrible crime. and everyone in the comments agreed. that's when i left that subreddit
Yeah often people would side with the poster even when irl most of us would think the other side is the reasonable one. I used to think it's mostly benign misunderstanding but I don't anymore, I think those type of post highlight people secret hate.
It actually is a pretty interesting tool to see what people secretly hate. I knew there's a ton of trans hate before Reddit off course, but I didn't realise how much hate there is around relatively benign things like pronouns (as is your example) or dating people who aren't lgbtq+ (mostly "trans person calls me racist because I don't want to date them". There are a ton of those on Reddit, irl this probably never happened)
It's a hateful place
After a while you learn that any post in a popular sub is going to be transphobic ragebait and/or will be filled by the most bigoted comments. Hell, anything outside of a trans-centric sub is sure to be like that, even other lgb subs
And every few months there is a shit ton of infighting inside of trans subs! The whole site is a mess, i just stay there for the sims 2 sub
@@mauroc1896 You captured the reddit™ experience so well lmao. It sucks balls.
@@mauroc1896 yeah, communities online tend to implode, especially as there's a lot of very real pressure coming from other Reddit subs and the world outside. It's really ashame, especially for teens and adults who don't live in cities that desperately need some community.
Oh well at least there's cat Reddit - r/illegallysmolcats never disappoints
@@mauroc1896btw you probably shouldn't be leaving off the T in the acronym because that is literally one of the things people that are transphobic do.
Poop cancer reddit story proves that art isn't dead on the modern internet
words that have never been uttered in this order ever before
I think you missed "You can't wear that," which I used to see more often with a friend or family member complaining about OP, who is just too sexy in their bikini/dress. Often overlaps with an unreasonable religious person, because it's revealing (bonus points if it's not revealing) or an unreasonable fat person, who is jealous of OP's body.
These days, I see more with dresses than bikinis and it often overlaps with wedding drama. It also always seems to include a convenient link to where you can buy the dress...
"You can't wear that to my wedding" is a very popular microcategory, from wearing white to "you're upstaging me", which is obviously a bridezilla.
or, the other way around where someone who might be overweight or conventionally unattractive is told not to where certain things.
the biggest one of me has always been hatred of mothers. in a significant amount of posts of this kind, the villain is a mother that is deemed unreasonable, regardless of the intentions of the autor.
mother is a teen? sl*t, irresponsible
mother needs a favor due to an emergency? entitled, no one owes you anything just because you got cr**mpied (this is a common phrase/sentiment too, very gross)
mother needs a long term support arrangement due to circumstances totally out of her control? should've though about that possibility before you opened your legs
and so on
a lot of these "villain tropes" easily conflate in the mother archetype: someone that often needs extra help (entitled), that can be mentally unstable due to stress, hormones or disorders like ppd (unreasonable), that is a woman that Has Had Sex (!!!) (sl*t). it's a very easy target, and you'll find that regardless of the author's intentions, mothers are deemed the villain very often. especially if they're single
it's all misogyny! reddit loves to shit on women for any minute reason
That's not a pattern I have observed.
I'd guess it makes sense, since motherhood is one of the most meaningful and emotionally charged concepts we know.
@@carlpanzram7081 it's a pattern a lot of women have observed. it also makes sense because reddit is rife with sexism so women are always critiqued more and in harsher ways than men
@@carlpanzram7081 I used to be very active in a subreddit that discussed exactly the theme of this video, it was a pattern we saw a lot
In general, if the villain is a woman, she is going to be venomously despised, and if the villain is a man, he'll be given devil advocates, "we don't know both sides", white knights, and other sympathies. Reddit will say that women are treated better in society but will turn around and say the most vitriolic things torwards women in general
RPG horror stories is an absolute goldmine for all of this. Honestly if stories on there didn’t already fit into so many of these categories just with a D&D coat of paint, I’d say rpg rage bait could be a category all its own. Subcategories for bad DMs and bad players, controlling partners, entitled friends, and lot and lots of extremely over the top creep stories.
Hard agree, RPG stuff deserves its own category.
That "crazy DM" with the 40 rules that included unreasonable rules like "don't show up too wasted to play" and "don't constantly mock me in our own game" comes to mind lol
@@Stellafera I mean both sound pretty reasonable to me, honestly.
The RPG horror story subs surely have way more real stories than AITA. I've seen them play out in real life over and over and over.
@@AliceLoverdrive they were being sarcastic, hence the quotes on "crazy dm"
poor SampleOP, they have such a stressful life 😢
no I hate them
One thing I always find fascinating is that the vast majority of posts on these subreddits can be real, but they never get half the up votes of the fake stories because they’re often confusing rambles with no structure. Because your average person sucks at explaining stories in writing, and life is rarely as simple as it is in stories. Storytelling is a craft.
Because of this, people have a hard time wading through it, leading to confusion/swiping away and even the belief that the post is fake.
I see this especially with the r/helpme subreddit. God I feel so bad for the people on there. Absolutely desperate. But people get zero help because most of their points are confusing or not interesting, and therefore get little views or comments.
In sharp contrast to the thousands people scrambling to support and help whatever cheated on father/mother is asking for support this week on r/aita or something.
I also love the clarification that just because something CAN happen to someone, that doesn’t mean that these stories are real. I often see comments going “well my mother in law harassed me so there’s a chance this is real,” ignoring the fact that everything else about the story fits so cleanly into the ragebait formula.
And like “they’re co-opting your trauma for Internet points” is such a perfect way to put it. Because it’s not like these experiences don’t happen to people, like fiction is based on reality, but that doesn’t mean these stories aren’t trying to provoke you for engagement, influence your world view, or that these stories are necessarily real (especially in conjunction with how neat everything is). They’re co-opting real stories for ragebait, often to push a worldview. Reminds me a lot of Sarah Z’s complicated video on tumblr fake stories.
I do tend to err on treating certain stories as true, at least if I choose to comment on them, mainly stories of abuse. Because if there's even the slightest chance the person is a real victim, I want them to know their situation is not their fault and they need to get out.
As an abuse victim myself, I know the mental gymnastics one can perform to justify the things happening, and how hard it is to break that mindset. Even if it's probably fake, I just don't want to risk dismissing a real victim who needs help.
@@bishielurfer yeah, I usually treat it like r/nosleep. it's probably fiction, but you respond as if it were real. just in case
@@hyperturbotechnomike your in laws sound very sweet! IT's SO TRUE the way these stories often have the most bizarrely specific details memorized. Sometimes whole dialogue exchanges lol. like i only started paying attention to "dialogue" when i became a writer and started writing down speech patterns and stuff, but that's not really something most people pay attention to. most people would paraphrase.
and yeah, I'm basing my experience off of my own turbulent teen years of going on reddit for help about my abusive mom. i'd read all those posts with supportive and thoughtful comments and assumed I'd also get help. Instead, I got mostly people confused, telling me that she loved me so just have faith (lol), or no feedback at all because I was much less coherent compared to the perfectly curated, top upvoted posts. Like how you can't see a relationship clearly until you've gotten some distance from it, people have a hard time explaining an issue when they're in distress.
Now, if I'd used all the tropey reddit terminology like "flying monkeys" or armchair "narcissism" or what have you, I'd have probably gotten more support, but at the loss of the nuance/honesty of what I was trying to say. Cliches and tropes have a tendency to be reductive, especially since they often make it easier to delineate between "villains" and "heroes." My mom isn't a "villain," she does indeed love me, but her actions hurt me, so treating her like an unfeeling villain erases the nuance of abuse, like how it's often perpetrated by the people who "love" us. Also I HATE the way therapy speak has leaked out into the general public from places like reddit fake stories because of the way people use it without really understanding the nuances of psychology, and then support their own ignorance with FAKE stories UGHHHHH
In effect, it means people don't recognize abuse in their own lives and can only recognize it if it comes in easy to digest forms. just like how nobody managed to see the issue with my mom on my teenaged post. it's an unending cycle for REAL
I usually instantly realize a post is most likely fake if it's too detailed. While you can embellish to make the story better even if the contents are true, I'd say it's pretty hard to describe something that has happened to you with a "book passage" level of detail if it makes sense, with elaborate dialogue, careful description of one's behavior like their body language, etc
This is a really good point, about how well the things are written. I had to actively remove myself from several subs bc they would upset me so much, I would be weeping while trying to explain to people to get out of abusive situations bc I could see my own naive past self in them, (and even though I’m not familiar with it directly the animal stuff really _really_ upsets me, so it’s a huge relief to know some of those are probably fake bc I have been really heartbroken over those). I have such a hard time accepting my own memories of abuse sometimes bc it would require malicious intent and evil I just can’t comprehend. I still struggle with this bc it feels so implausible. I dunno man it seems pretty shitty to me that certain folks don’t care to just co-opt what they remember hearing from real survivors to get fake attention, but in turn suck up real energy and time. God the internet really is like, the best and the worst of us just getting neutralized into nothingness
Reality is so much murkier and meandering. You’ll realize 10 years later that seemingly innocuous things at the time were actually clear proof of coercive control, but you rarely have razor sharp well formed timelines of events. Also, things usually don’t turn out with the hero getting vindication. Just desserts, Justice, or things working out eventually seem to be the most hard to believe element of a lot of these stories. A victim of CSA and domestic violence that marries an abuser she met at 16 who lies to get the kids when she finally leaves him bc that was his threat that kept her there will just go on to have multiple abusive relationships (including one who vindictively helps secure the ex’s hold over her kids bc that was _his_ threat when she’d try to leave _him_ ) is likely to find herself in one screwed up situation after another and maybe she will get therapy, figure out her disorders, and be less obviously distraught all the time but she’s sure as shit not going to be rich and perfect and unscarred by everything. She’s sure as shit not going to have the relationship she wanted with her kids. Stuff takes a toll, it’s subtle and often you blame yourself, you don’t just jump out and pwn your abusers by 28 years old and make everyone regret what they did/apologize/look like the jerks they are. You don’t realize before it’s too late that you should get advice or even have the clarity to know you need it, or the advice will be that you’re breaking your family up for “no reason.”
An abuser isn’t going to even think to consult Reddit for a judgement on whether they’re doing the right thing. They either are delusional and think they’re right, or they know they’re wrong but they’d never openly admit as to what the reality was. A gaslighter isn’t going to admit the truth to anyone, and an asshole doesn’t remember a passing interaction with a stranger and wonder if they were right. Assholes live longer. Rich people think they earned what they have, and most perpetrators of abuse will never even think twice about the harm they caused,and their lives will probably be easier than those of their victims.
BUMMERS GONNA BE A BUMMER I RECKON *crabwalks out
Edited bc I, too, am not only verbose as hell but also illiterate
this video has *everything*. a parody of yakko's world, CBAT as a bleep censor, a throwaway stefon reference, carrie underwood, beanie babies, sims, and a BDG-style spiral into madness. You know, the usage of rigorous methodology to aid in the creation of an intense genre typology for popular media as the presenter undergoes a gradual but increasing dishevelment that reflects their deteriorating mental state. brilliant!
There is a mini world of reddit rage bait you didnt touch on: Bad Dungeons and Dragons Games.
Bad DMs, players, player or dm’s family/partner, and more! It has its own tropes (railroading dm, the incel player hitting on a girl player, player who thinks theyre the Main Character [usually an edgy rogue], overstepping minmaxxer, dm hating minmaxxer’s fun, “who needs boundaries? we’re all friends!”, dm kills off character for petty over table reasons, rules lawyer player, general miscommunication).
It’s very fun. CritCrab reads a bunch of them it’s so fun :3
What a fascinating rabbit hole. Honestly the "my mother in law keeps pestering me and my husband does nothing" and "my family refused to attend my wedding if theres' no alcohol" are both such common shitty situations in life that I'm inclined to believe they're exceptions and most of them are genuine posts. Might be a cultural thing but where I live, I keep seeing people encounter that.
tbh lots of these categories are often (or most of the time) genuine and not bait, but are also common subjects of ragebait posts. its harder to tell with those unless theyre written badly
yeah some of them are definitely real, but it's kind of easy to spot the fake ones. i can't explain it but there's always one point where i get to like, "this one is definitely a creative writing exercise"
Well thats how it goes. The bait part is that they start with a situation people can relate to and are real, to get people to bite. But then it turns into to something so ridiculous
I've genuinely never known a single person to have bad relations with their in-laws. I've only known some reasonable disagreements like "you shouldn't marry someone who doesn't have a stable job yet because they might find a job that's far away". So either everyone I know is unnaturally chill about their child's choice of partner or people on the internet exaggerate a LOT (obviously the latter).
@@theshire9173 the partner of my boyfriends mom (kinda his stepfather, but the mom is not married to him and my boyfriend doesn't want to call him anything involving the word "father")
is a serious asshole like absolutely unreasonable despicable human trash, I expect some trouble coming in our way when we get married or decide to have kids or anything where you normally involve your family to some degree.
He definitely is a person that is reddit-ragebait-post-worthy.
I'm so thankful you took the time and effort to dissect this topic for us. As someone with multiple marginalized identities, it's painful o see stories meant to smear public perception of people like me proliferate all over the Internet. I'd hate to come across someone with views corrupted by Reddit posts, someone who only views me as a derivative caricature to be vilified rather than a nuanced human being. Videos like these are big steps in the progression of media literacy and critical thinking, especially when presented with a such a sharp wit! Bravo!
same here, ragebait like this makes me so paranoid doing anything in public.
and another thank you to li, this was an entertaining watch
Unrelated to the discussion, but nice Juan Carlos PFP!
Buen intento Juan Carlos Bodoque, pero todos sabemos de tus deudas y adicción por las apuestas han sido base de destrucción a tus relaciones... eres el culohueco (YTA)
BUENO YA MAS EN SERIO, pero pienso lo mismo. Tu comentario es muy elocuente así que gracias
After this video I think I know one. Me and and my best friend first bonded over raging about how shitty life is, and questioning our gender. When I called them a feminist because they'd agreed me, but they answered a strong no, and when I asked why they just said they've seen enought to not to want to be associated with them.
Years later I said I might be non-binary they were like "oh that's completely okay", then ranted about people being mad that some lesbians feel insulted being labeled queer (which I now know was a popular terf talking point). When I came out as trans masc they said they're totally supportive, but over the years have talked really negatively about non-passing transes and how the hormones affect the body. And they often rage just in general about horrible things they've heard people do.
I feel like they're the type to fall into every hate train and bait (not that I'm judging, I'm extremely naive), and partly because of that fell down into an alt-right rabbithole. Even if ignoring the alt-right pipeline, it's just very tiring to be with someone who's now-a-days always so angry, ranting for hours about stuff that has little if any bearing on their life, and yet they react like somebody shat in their mouth and slapped them while calling their dad a racist.
@@NukkuiskoHyvinVaiPois Omg I pity them. Having all that dumb shit living in your head rent free must be so exhausting. For me, emotions are like muscles; they get tired from overuse. I used to be a huge worry wart when I was younger, but I burnt myself out so I don't worry that much anymore.
That person needs a hobby besides reading outrageous stories.
the comprehensiveness. the cbat censor. the yakko warner trigger warning. the slowly disintegrating fit. any time you made a reference in your explanations it killed me. li speaks more like li ATE
There's also period drama. A LOT of period drama. The period posts have even gained the nickname "period troll is back at it again" in "Am I the Angel"
I remember an "unreasonable disabled person" story that turned out to be an "unreasonable caregiver" and "parentification" story that really touched my heart. It was a teenage girl who had been forced to be her autistic younger sisters caregiver for a long time and grew resentful of her. The post was titled something like "aita for despising my mentally handicap sister?" And it was about an incident where she broke down when her dad told her to get a degree that would pay well so she could afford to take care of her sister when the parents were gone.
She talks about feeling guilty for hating her sister, but throughout the post it becomes clear that her anger is misdirected.
There was an update. She ended up reaching out to her Grandpa, who was shocked that she was the one caring for her sister. Some family members had been sending money to help pay for the professional care that the sister needed, but they just kept it. Grandpa got her out of the house and the extended family rallied around her to give her the support and love she'd been missing.
I know this has become a bit of a trope on its own. The parentified sibling of a disabled person is rescued by extended family who thought they were paying for the siblings care. But this one was like 5 years ago. I think it was the first, true one that inspired the copycats.
The part that hit the hardest was late in the update post, OP says that through all this, she's realized she doesn't hate her sister, she loves her sister with all her heart and felt deeply guilty for ever projecting her anger onto her.
I think I remember that, sweet story.
So, my main subreddit of choice is BORU--best of redditor updates--which is exclusively about OPs who posted updates after taking the advice of AITA, relationship advice, etc. This is also a hotbed of ragebait and fake stories because people will post their fake stories, and then continue the saga for more internet points. Most of your categories have encapsulated the posts on BORU, but if I may have some suggestions:
1) The Tator Tot switcheroo. A woman has a great relationship with her boyfriend or husband, who presents himself as a feminist and liberal, and supports his girlfriend/wife/female partner's career. Then, the male partner either starts listening to Andrew Tate, and either starts demanding the female partner acts as a "high value woman" (ex, she leaves her high-paying executive job to be a stay-at-home-wife) or begins enacting Andrew Tate's advice (ex, negging his partner so she won't leave him). Bonus points if the female partner is the main breadwinner, and the Tator Tot is unemployed, but not a stay at home husband who does chores/looks after the children. Bonus bonus points as when the female partner leaves, the Tator Tot then breaks down and begs for his ex back. I'd argue this is separate from the "baby switchup" because this is specifically about someone drastically changing their values due to an outside influence (Andrew Tate/his clones) as opposed to a specific event (a baby being born).
2) The Evil StepChild. While this does overlap with the Benevolent Step-Parent, where the stepparent is kind, loving, and follows boundaries, it specifically has the step-children aggressively rejecting not only any attempts of "being a family", but any attempts at a peaceful co-existence with the step-parent. This can be either long term (i.e., the child has always rejected their step-parent) or an acute incident (i.e., the step-parent and step-child previously had a good relationship, but the reintroduction of a biological, usually deadbeat, parent resulted in the step-child rejecting their parent).
3) Under the "unreasonable minorities", the "unreasonable abuse victim". This is when the subject of the post is very clearly being abused by someone, and said abuse is coloring their interactions with others. This is *not* when someone seems to act unreasonably and then is later revealed to have been abused; this is specifically when the OP knows or could reasonably assume this relationship is abusive, but does not seem to account for how that abuse could influence the abuse victim's interactions with others.
Also, I would suggest renaming "Pop Psych Narcissism" to "Pop Psych Personality Disorder". While accusations of narcissism definitely are the most popular, I think bait about people with bipolar personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder can also be put under the PPN umbrella.
I just made a comment about the pop pysch thing too! BPD, borderline, psychopath, sociopath... People will throw any term around to paint a villian.
@@TenApplesforTime Just a heads up -- BPD is Borderline Personality Disorder, Bipolar is usually abbreviated as BP1 or BP2.
@@TenApplesforTime also see a lot of failure/refusal to understand what the golden child/scapegoat dichotomy actually means irl and acting as though it means one child is showered with love and gifts and the other is literally cinderella but worse
BORU is great because I like "completed" stories. Still a lot of ragebait but at least most of them have a conclusion of some sort
I'd argue that the Unreasonable Allergy and Unreasonable Vegan could both be lumped into the same category, call it "Unreasonable Dietary Restrictions". I've seen both kinds of posts and they tend to overlap in conflict but just have different reasons as to why they person can't eat that specific item. This new broader category would also be able to include religious dietary restrictions (see the post about a roommate not allowing OP to cook pork in the communal oven/microwave because of religious reasons).
you could include things like people following keto and other diets too
That actually is how kosher laws work, although to my understanding it's only the cooking implements that need to not touch treyf (you could just buy and label your own sets) and I believe the oven and stovetop can have been used for treyf as long as they've been cleaned before you cook on them. Most Orthodox people I know just ask at restaurants that their food be cooked on a separate grill from where treyf foods are cooked if possible. It's basically as if you have an allergy to pork, I don't really get why accommodating an allergy would be reasonable but kosher isn't, although personally I'd just buy my own cookware and idk, an attachment for the stovetop to separate the food or something.
@leonardegan2883 "I really don't get why accommodating an allergy would be reasonable but kosher isn't" - I don't think asking for people to accommodate kosher is unreasonable, but it's not hard to understand why the standards of what's reasonable to ask for are different when failing to accommodate something properly could *literally kill someone*.
I think the thing that makes it hard for people to work out how many Reddit stories are really fake is that human behavior is extremely varied so that even the most implausible stories could be true- especially if they involve only a few people or a closed group (imo this is less true when it’s like, a group of strangers clapped after I did a cool thing!! but when it’s about interpersonal relationships or one person being odd or horrible, yes)
BUT there is such a huge gulf between “a human being could and probably has done or experienced this” and “a human being who experienced this decided to write a Reddit post about it” and I think far fewer people understand this.
I had a very strange experience that I briefly considered putting on Reddit because I kind of wanted to hear what other people thought of it but in the end I didn’t because a) it sounds extremely fake and b) if it blew up there was no way the other person involved wouldn’t recognize that I was talking about us. So I just, you know, didn’t make a Reddit post and instead there is exactly one friend in my life who knows about it and I’ll probably never tell the story again. This is, I think, the waaay more natural response to having a complicated interpersonal interaction. At least the not putting it on Reddit part. However we’ve all had experience with something that resembles an AITA post so they often feel very real.
Really I think the value or point of these posts is mostly roll play. Here’s a situation what do you think is the correct response? Look at what other people consider the correct response. Like the questions at the back of a story in an English text book.
I love AITA’s description as “for the moral philosopher in all of us” because I think that’s exactly what these fake stories are all about. They’re basically thought experiments being set up by OP so that people can debate about them in the comments.
I know I’m personally addicted to these types of posts because I’m not very adept at social dilemmas, so these role plays are like places for me to see analyses on what the acceptable course of action is. Unfortunately, it’s a bit like the blind leading the blind, so Reddit not the most optimal place to learn social cues/behavior lol 😂
I think the funniest part about Reddit stories is that, as you’ve said, it takes a certain type of person to post their real life on Reddit, so it’s always funny when the writer forgets that and has some crotchety 65 year old man who doesn’t know what a forum is ask stuff on r/relationships or AITA. Like, we’re gonna have to suspend some disbelief here and pretend that this old guy would know how to navigate AITA or r/relationships’s stringent posting policies. XD
It's why it's a lot easier to discuss AITA and related sub stories as less 'Give every story's credibility the benefit of the doubt' bc some bait is obvious or even word for word summaries of a tv show or book plot and more 'I'm giving my points in relation to this situation as it happens in real life and not bc I believe someone's 70 year old mom went to Reddit to expect random strangers to side with her poor treatment of her daughter in law'
I also agree with the other commentor that Reddit isn't the best sample size for human behaviour or how to handle situations, esp with the 'You don't owe anyone anything ever' attitude being so prevalent that's ironically being combated with Tumblr's concept of the human tarpit considering its own prolific history with fake stories that have entertained people and also caused like long reaching harm to perceptions of different people.
i agree with the aita basically being role play. i have seen quite a few aita users say that they know most stories are fake, but enjoy pretending as if they are real for fun
@@user-kx5en8dg7uif you're not familiar with it, you may like r/nosleep! They're posts about fake horror events or stories, but the point of the subreddit is to interact with posts as if they're real things that happened.
@@allyli1718 Interesting. I've always struggled with social skills but I'm also really interested in why people people, so I closely analyzed human behaviour in schools and such for years in an effort to copy it (how do you do fellow hu-men) and apparently ended up teaching myself what nature refused to give me, since I've had multiple mental health professionals claim I have good social skills even if I still feel I don't. I guess that's the old-fashioned way for what you're doing 😄
Thank you for mentioning how obsessed Reddit is with an incorrect understanding of NPD. No one ever brings it up.
This video made me think about one reddit comment I saw about a father's relationship with his very estranged children. Their mother was dead and he had fallen into hard times and with a bad crowd, so he gave his daughter to be adopted by a wealthy friend of her mother, and his son, to his stepbrother and his wife. It sounded completely real until the point where OP mentioned he had cut off his son's hand during a tense family reunion. Then I realized that the author was effectively describing Darth Vader
The “evil homophobic family member(s)” vs “ good accepting family member(s)” stories are ones I enjoy despite knowing how fake they are 😫😭
Thank god homophobic family members don't exist in real life
My mother (57F) almost caused a car crash because I (31NB) recently came out as genderfluid
A few weeks ago, my mother said I'll always be her daughter, and in a moment of bravery, I told her that actually, sometimes I'm her daughter, sometimes her son and sometimes something in between. My mother accepted this, and fast forward to yesterday
My mom calls me while my sister was driving her, and my mom asks if, instead of calling me her daughter, she should just call me her offspring. My sister, taken off-guard, laughed so hard she almost lost control of the vehicle and had to pull off to the side of the road. AITA?
@@AllegedlyHumanabsolutely love the baity title. very accurate, perfectly captured reddit. 10/10
@@_bibi_s haha, thank you!
Big fan of learning more about ragebait (I've seen an influx of it recently), but my lizard brain saw the thumbnail and went "TALLY HALL?!"
Yeah, I find that once you get into them everything suddenly looks like a sign, easy to see from the outermost clime
Ahhh that brings me back
Crazy how Tally Hall invented colored ties
My favorite AITA posts are within fandom subreddits where fans will make up AITA stories from the POV of characters. Just as fictional as any other AITA post but way more fun for me 😅
Omg same.
Ive also seen people in some writing servers Im in use it as a writing exercise, both fandom fave characters as well as for their OCs.
and then it throws you off. see the sims examplies cited in this video. see also Stardew Valley or Skyrim where you have to do a double take.
I one time did this for raskolnikov from crime and punishment, posted it on the actual AITA, and got banned for a week
0:11 Li Speaks, the 6th member of Tally Hall
when they said intended for teens they weren't joking
HELPPP OMG
THANK YOU SOMEONE ELSE THOUGHT OF THAT
we need a trilogy of this, a video about fake tumblr stories, and one about 4chan greentexts
Maybe things have changed since I used to peruse AITA but I found reddit to be harsher on parents than the childfree folks most of the time. A lot of "How dare those damn entitled parents ask you to accommodate them somewhat when THEY are the ones that chose to have a stupid baby" type energy
Yes exactly!
I am always impressed at the amount of research Li does and how articulate she is.
I've seen other video essays where a lot of people try to be pseudo intellectual but can't form a full sentence and get their point across.
It's inspiring
IKR like thank you for inviting us to your symposium Li! When can we expect the published article? (Only half joking)
that content warning was ART
The unethical Polyamory < Backfire really gets people revved up. It’s basically AITA bread and butter at this point.
There are tons of Redditors prepared to confidently assert that the relationship is over as soon as someone suggests non-monogamy of any kind.
27:20 I’d personally say Reddit is about 50/50 on the issue of pit bulls, with people either saying they’re inherently evil monsters or that they’re inherently angelic babies. Which means pit bull bait posts are a hellscape of arguing I would never wish on anyone
The fact that you used that one song to censor curse words is legitimately one of the funniest things ever lmfao
Big win for critical thinking and media literacy today
The best Reddit fake stories are from paranormal subreddits. Like yes Reddit, give me my weird knocking sounds and lights flickering and seeing weird shadows!!
Edit: I liked this video so much, I think it would be interesting to see a paranormal version! Some ideas for the categories and subcategories:
- Shadow people
- Peeking ghost
- Definitely sleep paralysis
- Weird dreams
- Electrical issues
- Orbs
- Experiences that involve a creature/entity from a culture OP has probably not researched enough (very common with w*ndigo and s*inw*lker posts)
Unreasonable living: a ghost is just trying to...die their death?...but the mortals redecorate their place and won't give them any personal space or peace and quiet.
why are reddit people so obsessed with saying every weird thing they see is a native american myth creature and never like... a dracula or something
It's fun to search for mentions of your hometown/childhood hangouts on those subs. Won't get a hit on all of them, but when you do it is funny seeing someone like "Holy shit don't go to [x] in the middle of the night!!! I almost got possessed by a ghost!!!!!!" and it's a place you hung around all the time at night when you were like 12. I grew up in Appalachia so it's especially common for me to see this, I spent plenty of time in the woods at night with friends or family and not been possessed once
@melvinof129 I don't think they mean that these creatures wouldn't attack non-native people. Rather that the "author" uses the name without finding out enough about how said creature is supposed to work, and makes silly mistakes. In an actual fictional story, you can pick and choose traits for your monsters; you should, really, makes it more interesting. But in a fake story that is meant to be read as if it was real, you probably want to find out what is accepted as hard, real-life canon, and use that.
Like if someone wrote about a vampire that doesn't have fangs. In a book, fine, in a post, silly.
@@molluscumlore I'm from the Midwest, so there's a lot of stuff about my state in particular. I can confirm it is pretty creepy. But most of the paranormal experiences I've had could be explained away by my cats doing weird stuff.
The increasingly dishevelled look is amazing not only as a visual gag but also as a demonstration of what happens to your mental health after being on Reddit for too long
Under Childfree category (and if this is covered in another category just ignore), there is Childfree Person Dating/Marrying Single Parent. Usually split between Childfree Person wants absolutely nothing to do with the kids despite marrying the parent, or the parent pulls a SURPRISE KIDS on the childfree person. Bonus if the single parent suddenly gets full custody of the kids because their ex died with no warning.
1:34 the name for that one is just “prodigal son”, you could say that story has been around for a few thousand years
In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the son came back to beg his father to just let him work among the servants and laborers, just enough to survive. But the father welcomed him as a son and restored him in his house. The son was not entitled in the parable, at that point.
I am simply way too impressed with the Yakko's world content warnings to not say anything. I am not really a reddit person but you've got me hooked
i legit screamed HALLELUJAH WE ARE SO BACKKKK !!!
One thing that I’ve seen on Reddit that seems disturbingly common is the: “I hate my [x] (usually a child, son, daughter, sibling ect.) who is [y] ([y] HAS to be a disability of some sort. Usually autism or ADHD)
Yep and they aren't fiction unfortunately. Our abelist world is very challenging.
And the disability either has nothing to do with the post or OP obsessively fixates on it
An almost 2 hours video essay from a youtuber I just discovered? This must be my lucky day
My brain doesn't think that someone lies, cuz my brain doesn't understand why anyone would tell a lie or make something up
I saw “make a story up on aita and whoever gets the most likes wins” as a challenge once and someone got several thousand likes and hundreds of comments. People just do it to entertain themselves
"You think someone would just do that? Just go on the internet and tell LIES?"
Same. Like sure logically I know that people can and do lie, I just never assume that's what's going on. I guess I just don't get the thrill of having hundreds of people comment, believe and share you're made-up story, it would feel completely hollow to me because it's fake. It's like pretending to be someone else to get friends
my autistic ass
Same I usually assume it's real because there's no point in them lying. I also find some of the stories interesting.
This is so well made, thank you.. Aita is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I get kind of tired seeing the same tropes word for word repeated. Anytime I see "now everyone is blowing up my phone calling me an a-hole" or "my partner wont talk to me for no reason! Update: okay yes I told them to die in a fire, i dont see how its relevant??" I just roll my eyes... I dont mind the fake nature of aita, its the uncreativity that gets me down. That, and people being absolutely unhinged in the comments on obviously fake posts.
Honestly i would love to see so much deep dive content on reddit. Another thing ive noticed on reddit is that a lot of the posting base (users who post) are very ... mean and narrow minded. Like especially for stupid things like your favorite ways of dressing or what you did today, if you go against the hive mind (which is never clearly defined) people get downright nasty. People can also be very toxically negative to the point where if you havent felt the same then you must be lying. Idk. I used to be close in a few communities of which i identify with the traits, but ive slowly stopped using reddit recently because it felt like i was being debated on for not having a wholly negative view on my life. I dont know how to say more without doxxing myself or revealing things on this account that i dont want to. Anyways, it seems to me that these experiences for me are unique to reddit. I've not experienced things like this anywhere else, especially not in real life.
I’ve definitely felt that way, people are very pedantic on there about grammar and spelling and stuff and I feel like that maps on very easily to an “im objectively right” kind of attitude
It depends on where you hang out. If you’re in a subreddit for something like video games (or even just one for just a singular popular game) or one for politics, for example, yeah you’re gonna have a bad time. People are cruel and mean because they want to be. But if you hang out in smaller, niche communities or funny cat subreddits people are pretty chill and nice.
I think this has a few causes, primary being the relative anonymity of reddit. Until recently, it was very much not a site where you would ever use your real name or have a real profile picture. It used to be that you didn't even need an email address to make a reddit account. It's a lot easier to be an a-hole when what you're saying isn't directly linked to you.
This feeds into the secondary factor, the founding culture of the site. It was created as an anonymous, barely-moderated message board for people with specific interests. That combination is a breeding ground for strongly held opinions expressed without regard for social graces. Plus, the upvote/downvote/karma system is a social credit scheme that actively rewards people for conforming to a group.
There's some cool things about reddit, but the overall site culture unfortunately isn't one of them.
@@GhostsMcGee on forums of the old people didn't attach their real names or real pictures and nobody was nasty, while on facebook people post most vile shit imaginable with their real identities attached, so I don't think it's the anonymity.
@@AliceLoverdrive I feel like Reddit has actually become more toxic as it has become more mainstream, tbh. Because now the toxicity is coming from professional bad actors, AI, corporations, and hostile governments.
Another subcategory is “the ‘writers’ barely disguised Plagiarism.” I often see many ragebait posts copying from other posts or pieces of fiction
you forgot my personal favorite “light switch surprise” where OP suspects partner is doing something strange (usually cheating) and OP waits for them to come home late at night then turns on the light right as they come home and confront them.
Unreasonable expert - I think you included teacher, but while this could be associated with any expert who mansplains or is incorrect about something, what pops into my mind is a dismissive doctor who writes a patient's serious illness off as just needing to lose weight (or sleep more, etc) until they get a second opinion.
That's not a fictional situation tho?
@@mykaruest3620every fake reddit story takes cues from actual events or else nobody will take the bait. A lifetume original movie is a full on assault of tropes v women, that doesn't mean it's a real story. Every fucki g liar ever has taken a kernal of truth and extrapolated it into a false narrative.
I saw one of those youtubers who talks about "disturbing reddit posts" do a video on a blatant fetish story
Ok you have to share more
@@northstarjakobs it was a story about a trans girl trying to seduce her dad 😭
elaborate!! what was the story??
@@chibitali4 some kind of story about a trans girl wanting to get with her dad 💀
@@cloudycolacorp WAIT WAIT I THINK I SAW THAT ruclips.net/video/OEkzKKEDwWM/видео.htmlsi=Me0QdNblPE3sF_mL was it this video?? lol
Loved that the censors are snippets of Cbat 😭 also people on Reddit who make posts simply for the creative writing factor completely disrespect those who may have gone through similar experiences (referencing to abuse/death OR death of someone/or situations that just should not be taken lightly) ESPECIALLY if they take it to serious Reddits and get real advice from people genuinely concerned
I tend to just believe most of the Realistic category posts unless they're posted in a suspiciously targeted fashion (for example, the lesbian subs I'm on getting flooded with unreasonable trans person stories) but this is a great taxonomy of the Maybe+ categories.
1:00:21 i love this "remember to get some water" reminder so much but i can't describe why. it's such a friendly and warming reminder amidst of this one-hour long summary of terrible fictions.