I Love Seeing Terrible People Realize They Are Wrong
Reading Time: 6 minutesI Found the Perfect Place to Watch People Humiliate Themselves Online. It Thrills and Haunts Me., Introducing r/Farhad, an occasional column about the delights of Reddit communities., Reddit communities are great for seeing terrible people realize they are
This is the first installment of r/Farhad, in which MediaDownloader contributor Farhad Manjoo delves into the Reddit communities that bring him peculiar joy.
A man decides to steal his girlfriend’s dinner. You know, as a prank.
Late one night after a long shift at work, the girlfriend orders take-out from a new burger place in town. How hilarious would it be if he gobbled up her food while she showered?
Right, very. So it’s odd that the girlfriend doesn’t laugh—indeed, she almost cries—when he tells her that he’s eaten her burger. By now most restaurants have closed, and the only dinner the girlfriend can scrounge up is a bowl of rice and mayo; she eats it in seething silence, almost as if she’s mad at him. Then the man has an epiphany. He swears to his girlfriend that he doesn’t mean this in an offensive way, but could she be overreacting to his silly joke because she’s on her period?
She asks him to leave.
Puzzled by the whole thing, the man brings his tale before our foremost oracle on domestic strife, Reddit. Something is just beginning to dawn on him, he pleads to the court of the internet, but he’s not quite sure: Was he the asshole here?
It’s certainly possible that this is ragebait—a confession so calculatedly oblivious to its own evil that it can’t possibly be true, its only goal to rile up outrage for internet points. But a couple of years ago I discovered r/AmITheDevil, a subreddit that showcases at least a dozen such situations every day: cartoonishly villainous Redditors considering, apparently for the first time, Are we the baddies? I’m not kidding when I say that r/AmITheDevil has given me new appreciation for the lacuna of standard human cruelty; if just a fraction of these posts are even a little true, lots of people—maybe even you (though definitely not me)—are far more terrible than they know.
There are many things I love about Reddit, the vast discussion platform where people post and comment on a bottomless array of topics, with conversations organized into communities known as subreddits, but r/AmITheDevil highlights what I love about it most: Though any particular post might be fake, in its teeming totality the site offers a window on certain very specific themes, tropes, personality types, and other fine-grained details of society that are impossible to observe elsewhere. At the risk of getting too highfalutin, I’m reminded of David Foster Wallace’s 1993 essay on the strained dynamic between fiction writers and television. Writers, Wallace argued, love TV because it lets them observe human affairs without getting involved with actual humans. But TV, of course, is performative, not illustrative; it provides only the commercially stylized illusion of reality, ‘the fantasy that we’re transcending privacy and feeding on unself-conscious human activity,’ as Wallace put it. Reddit isn’t totally without performance (no place online is), but to me it offers something a lot closer to the voyeuristic authenticity Wallace claimed that writers craved from television. Spend enough time there and I guarantee you’ll find yourself gaining almost novelistic insight into what your high school English teacher called ‘the human condition.’
I’ve been regularly visiting Reddit since it launched in the mid-2000s—I always lurk, never comment—but in the past few years it has become the primary fix for what, to me, is a never-ending, all-consuming need: figuring out what’s happening on the internet right now. For more than a decade, Twitter filled this role; but as Twitter devolved into X, an unrecognizable, Elon-worshipping, MAGA-flirting husk of its old self, I have found much better return on my online attention at Reddit. My phone tells me I’ve used the Reddit app an average of about two and a half hours a day this week; YouTube, my second most-used app, clocks in at an hour and half.
Which brings me to the conceit of this occasional new column, r/Farhad, in which I’ll profile some of the most fascinating and confounding corners of Reddit—beginning, here, with r/AmITheDevil.
R/AmITheDevil is a subreddit about other subreddits, a forum whose members mainly critique posts from other places on Reddit. Its primary source and namesake is r/AmITheAsshole, one of Reddit’s largest advice subs, where the majority of posts are from well-meaning non-assholes overly concerned they may have been in the wrong. Things like: Was I wrong to tell off my pregnant, widowed neighbor for getting too familiar with my husband? (Reddit’s consensus: Of course not.) Or: I’m a teenager who loves to cook, but my family keeps criticizing my food—am I the asshole for refusing to keep cooking for them? (Certainly not!) Or: My parents hate my brother’s new wife. Am I the asshole for uninviting them from my upcoming party after they insisted I uninvite the new wife? (No way!)
R/AmITheAsshole has spawned a few spinoff subs, including r/AmITheAngel, where people make fun of posters obviously fishing for validation, and r/AmITheEx, featuring posts from people who haven’t realized they’ve irreparably harmed their relationships.
But r/AmITheDevil is on another level—a daily parade of such implacably delusional self-possession that it forces you to regularly lower your expectations of fellow humans’ basic decency.
What I find most fascinating are the storylines that come up again and again there. For instance, seemingly every day there are men suffering hang-ups about their masculinity, their fertility, or their paternity. Men are frequently surprised when their partners don’t take kindly to requests for DNA tests of their children. In one case, after a paternity test proves that he is indeed the father, a man laments that his wife seems to hate him. ‘She said she spent 10 years of her life with me faithfully just for me to slap her in the face with a dna test request,’ he writes. He thinks she’s not seeing his side of things—he just needed to know for sure that she wasn’t a liar. Still, he holds out hope: ‘It isn’t that serious and if she could just understand my perspective I think she’ll adjust hers,’ he writes.
Or consider the husband with a low sperm count who tells his friends and family that it’s actually his wife’s one-time tuberculosis diagnosis that’s preventing them from having a baby. His lie starts a rumor in their small town that his wife was suffering a mysterious ‘bacterial genital disease’ acquired during her reckless youth and that he, the husband, was now planning to divorce her over it. The man offers the following defense of his actions: Because his wife did actually once have TB and doctors hadn’t ruled it out as a contributing factor to their infertility, ‘I felt like I didn’t completely lie.’
A lot of posts are from people—yes, again, mostly men—whining about getting exactly what they asked for. Bored with their marriages, men beg their wives for open relationships—then, when the ladies aren’t lining up to date them and their wives are finding lots of new beaus, they want advice on how to close things up again. One man gets so sick of his wife bringing up problems in their relationship that he tells her to quit talking to him. She does just that: She stops telling him about her day, gives him one-word answers when he tries to chat, doesn’t even let him know about a big award she’s won at work. Now he’s sad. ‘What am I supposed to do? Is she punishing me or something?’ he wonders. ‘I didn’t think she’d take it this far and now I’m thinking she’s being petty.’
Are women ever the devils? Sure, but it’s rare, and their sins seem on the whole more benign. Here’s a woman who’s puzzled that a friend whose looks ‘everyone in the universe’ would ‘view as average’ scored a boyfriend who’s ‘out of her league.’ She thinks she has an answer: The friend makes a lot of money and the guy, a struggling medical student, is looking to mooch. Still, she’s kept this theory to herself. All she asks of Reddit is advice: ‘How can I bring this up to her?’
It’s heartening, I suppose, that the Reddit audience has little trouble spotting and shutting down the devils among them. Most tin-eared posters are greeted with a flood of commenters trying to set the OP—the original poster, in Reddit jargon—straight. Even more heartening, once in a while an OP who’s been overwhelmingly judged to be the asshole will concede their mistakes and pledge to make amends.
But that, too, is rare. A lot of times the devils will jump into the comments to fiercely defend themselves. This is always fun to see: They double and triple down, highlighting with every new comment the lengths to which humans will go to avoid admitting they’re the bad guy.
This gets to what is probably the best lesson I’ve gleaned from r/AmITheDevil: If you’re ever completely certain you aren’t the asshole, you probably are.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2024/04/reddit-communities-online-evil.html
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