The rage comics that do catch on in 2019 tend to be positioned as a caustic parody of the traditional form. “It’s seen as cringeworthy now, or ‘What were people thinking?’” he explains. Together, they pioneered a very specific web-literate tone earnest and zany, composed in AIM shorthand, with a distinct collegiate bent.ĭon Caldwell, managing editor of the meme-history database KnowYourMeme, calls it the “epic bacon” period - internet humor at its most naive and sincere. If you are of a certain age and online proclivity, you can probably remember burning entire evenings on r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu, as part of a healthy digital diet alongside I Can Haz Cheezburger, Texts From Last Night, and Fail Blog. Rage comics were one of the internet’s defining lexicons. Back in the day, we would have more submissions coming in than we could handle, even with 20 moderators.”
“Scrolling down the front page you very quickly get to posts that are a few months old. “We still have some posts that do very well, but we also still have posts that only get a handful of votes,” he says. Today, that number rarely escapes the single digits. One moderator, who’s been around the subreddit since its heyday but asks to stay anonymous, sheepishly shared with me a spreadsheet from 2014, in which the team logged over 1,000 total “mod actions” in a month.
#Top 10 rage comics mod
The mod team reports a few posts per week, the majority of which are reposts from rage comics that were drawn up six or seven years ago, but there’s the occasional scrap of original content that filters through the front door every blue moon. The inscription enshrined in the sidebar sums up the fruits of their labor nicely: “It’s still alive! Kinda…” The front page of r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu, taken on July 30, 2019. The subreddit will never resemble its former glory, but at the very least, it serves as a decent, well-curated tomb. Together, they purged the trolls and returned r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu to its intended state a place to post rage comics without a shred of irony. When they obliged, and he became a moderator, he went ahead and modded me.” “I got in contact with him, and then eventually in contact with Reddit officials requesting to give him modship. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but he’d express a desire to bring back law and order to the subreddit,” remembers Chase, when I interview him over Discord. “Upon discovering what was left of my favorite subreddit - decrepit, defunct, rampant with trolls - I stumbled upon a user in the comments sections of various posts. Chase spent most of his middle school years laughing at rage comics, so it was heartbreaking to find the subreddit left for dead, a feeding ground for those who’d wish to tarnish its memory. The front page was turned into a wasteland of low-effort posts, often completely unrelated to the titular comic format, each equipped with comment sections stuffed with juvenile bickering.
As rage comics had slowly dissipated from internet culture, a roving band of shitposters had moved in to squat on the bones of a dead meme. That puts it above r/halo, r/doctorwho, r/adventuretime, and dozens of other vibrant fan communities on the site.īut when Chase, an 18-year-old from the Midwest, returned to the subreddit last year, he found it in disarray. The epicenter for rage comics, one of the defining fixtures of Reddit’s native language, stands tall with 852,000 members. By sheer numbers, r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu will always be one of the most populated forums on the internet.
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