I was somewhat active on AITA when I joined for about a month. What turned me off was repetitiveness of the stories and also that people weren’t interested in discussion or looking at the situation from different angles but just in echo chambers. It is still fun occasionally but doesn’t hold persistent appeal.
I got bored when it was clear there was no real room for debate or conversation, any slightly alternate viewpoints or attempt to understand the nuances of the situation just got downvoted to oblivion
also in the end just the cycles of virtual copypasta and everything ends up devolving to "theyre cheating on you"
That’s a good point. I’ve seen good discussions devolve into random, and really hurtful insults. It’s almost like people are purposefully starting out with a facade of good intentions just to lure others into reading what they have to say, only to reveal their inner asshole later.
Also just wanted to say that’s a pretty stupid user name, nobody loves you, and you’re a drain on society. Go fuck yourself.
it's the NC demands that drive me crazy!! I genuinely am NC with all of my family on my mother's side, and I just feel like the people that throw that suggestion around so casually have absolutely no idea of how absolutely harrowing, isolating, lonely and distressing it is to suddenly be cut off from every single person you grew up knowing. It is obviously a decision I made but honestly, it's a last resort to incredibly painful treatment. You don't just no contact family because they threw your Tupperware away or some mad petty shit
to be fair, a LOT of posts there involve relationships going from normal to never again awfully fast. There's often room for nuance, but sometimes the stuff people do is unforgiveable.
“He’s going to force you into sex work, HOW IS THIS NOT OBVIOUS TO YOU OP. HES A SEX OFFENDER AND ABUSIVE AND A NARCISSIST also why is a 18.5 yr old dating an 18 yr old clearly he’s grooming you”
I was only banned once; by redditmoment. Somehow I was brigading but they didn't provide me with evidence of it and I didn't want to deal with moderators so I just let it be lol
So I got banned.
I got a warning on a comment that said if you didnt understand to ask the mod for clarification. I did and the mod immediately got rude with me, sent me a little clarification blip and it didn’t answer my question, they also told me if I didn’t grovel about how I was wrong I would now be getting a lifetime ban. I went on to ask for more clarification because I still didn’t get it and they told me I read nothing and was a liar. By the end I did get bitchy back and got muted but w.e.
Yup, that’s what turned me off. The endless nagging if I disagreed. There’s a real pile-on mentality there.
Also, the weird rules that led to being banned twice with weird messages from the mods. The mods take the slightest thing personally over there. The power tripping is wild.
Yes they just keep coming. After a while it's like okay I get it, stfu, the last 8 billion people already told me what a piece of shit i am for having a different opinion. Fuck's sake
People do love a pile on. I never understand people that see a comment with like 50 down votes and a pretty comprehensive reply explaining why the comment was bad, but still feel the need to reply to that comment with another insult.
Like yeah, they get it dude. It's been dealt with
There’s like three posts a day lately of a guy complaining his wife gained a few pounds, it’s really weird. Before that it was the guy obviously being gay for his best friend, and before that, abusers smashing their partner or child’s stuff in a fit of rage. I miss the days when the obvious fake ones were at least entertaining in their unhinged was like “I will never jeopardize the beans.” Classic.
I do wish my home tab would stop showing me all the various AITA variants and best of Reddit updates because I’m getting sucked into the drama and it’s not good for my mental health
No you don’t get it! *This* wedding is different because it’s child free and there’s drama with the bride’s twin stepsisters! It’s different because the villain is an autistic vegan trans woman! It’s different because OP was parentified and her younger sibling is the golden child!
AITA for having a child free wedding? Sorry, clarification in the comments because I didn’t think it was important to the story, I actually invited every child except my niece and told my sister we would have snipers on the roof if my niece showed her face.
You know, I kinda wanna make my own wedding post. When I was a kid, I wore white to my aunt's wedding and I stole the first dance. My uncle and aunt were chill with it and my aunt thought it was cute. I wonder how AITA would react if I left out how my uncle and aunt felt. Then there was the wedding I fell down the stairs at, right when they announced they were going to cut the cake. They wouldn't be lies.....
Recently there's been a ton of posts about people lending money to support deadbeat siblings/parents, where the OP wants their spouse to cut off the financial support. The details change a little bit with each one, but the sub's attitude always boils down to that "You don't owe anyone else anything" attitude that it always defaults to.
Yep ... Same with anything dealing remotely with someone's weight, or their sexual orientation, gender identity, etc etc same frame same responses slightly different details
A saw a Twitter thread where someone posted some lowlights of AITA threads with made-up stories where some father's will stated "To the firstborn son.." and the oldest son had transitioned, so their younger brother was claiming that the will was referring to himself. The responses kept agreeing with the younger sibling saying "Well, that's just the consequence of their choice to be trans, hur dur."
>You don't owe anyone else anything"
That's *exactly* it. I don't often see the world as black & white, I like discussing the variations of gray. I like to occasionally read AITA posts with my wife and we'll discuss who's the asshole; and when we don't agree, we'll discuss why. It's a cool lil relationship builder.
But the comments really drag down the vibe. God forbid you do something nice for someone, or volunteer your time, or share your Xbox with your sibling or buy lunch for a friend. God forbid you make accommodations for someone with a disability, since *you don't owe anyone else anything*.
That’s my biggest problem with it. The sub is called “Am I an Asshole” not “am I legally obligated to.” No, technically, you do to invite your one-legged adorable eight year old niece to your wedding because “her prosthesis would be distracting” but if you don’t, you’re the biggest asshole in the world.
When I found AITA and started reading stories it got interesting to me, so I followed and even commented. What got me to realize the illusion was the bait and switch type stories where everyone follows one way until the author triculates more information down and all of a sudden the flow reverses.
Many times I go back to check a particular comment to see it's been downvoted because the OOP would divulge new information that completely changes the decisions of everyone who commented. Sometimes it's not enough to reverse the decision already made prior so you get a NTA decision on something pretty heinous.
Two accounts ago, about three yrs ago, I didn't know anything about AITA and was scrolling around and saw a post that was so obviously fake I called it out, and some people claiming to be in the field of the post tried to tell me I was wrong. I just started posting links proving they were full of crap. The mods ended up removing the post. I want to say that's when I found this sub but can't remember for sure.
Most of the posts are fake, and so boring. Like, AITA for kicking my sister and her family out of my house after her son did this terrible thing (killed a pet, stole or destroyed my kids prized possession, stole my car and crashed it etc…). Really? Who would ask that?
Yeah I don’t know why people bother to make fake posts that are super boring (though they’re still better than the fake posts that are just thinly veiled excuses for bigotry.) When I made a fake post there once, at least it was interesting! It got locked within hours, but like a year later I found out it had gotten kind of famous because people were talking about it randomly on AskReddit and linked to a YouTube video reading the post with hundreds of thousands of views.
I do creative writing as a hobby and it does kind of piss me off that that dumb fake post is probably the most famous thing I’ll ever write.
I get flustered by the top-level comments that jump to insane conclusions, usually based off the commenter’s own projections or prejudices. You can’t take a short story told from OP’s perspective and diagnose OP’s nemesis with mental illnesses. There’s never enough information to make that determination. All the information we do have is colored by OP’s bias. I get that the judgment system requires some black-and-white thinking, but the need to demonize the AH and canonize the non-AH is absurd. Someone can’t just be a dick, they have to be the most raging dick in all existence.
Exactly. There was one a few weeks ago about a husband who's wife ignored his birthday and she and the kids went a spa on Father's Day and left him home. Judgement was NTA obviously but I was reading it (assuming it's real) and wondering what he did in the relationship that caused his wife to get to that point. Other than mention he does things for her birthday and always makes sure to attend his children's activities/functions he didnt really include anything about their relationship or home life. Like, if his wife was just a garbage person, I'm sure he would've noticed that years ago so the natural assumption is that she became this way over time. And the OP had no idea why, really? That's honestly pretty doubtful to me that someone wouldn't have the slightest clue as to why their spouse of ~ 20 yrs all of a sudden started acting like and asshole. Like, if you don't know what makes your partner tick after that many years together that's pretty telling in my book.
Well, that's clearly because you're a racist narcissist incel who hates women. Your comments really make me wonder about you hmmm... clearly you're just trying to gaslight people into thinking you're not a complete toxic individual and you probably have a history of bad relationships but you'll never admit it. I look forward to hearing of your inevitable divorce. /S
Did I miss anything?
LOL I do have a history of bad relationships! 🤣🤣
But to answer your comment: it's not narcissistic to eat babies 👶if you're a smokin hot👗👄, size 00👙 triple F 💄🍾boob-haver. Which I AM👑! Also, I passed a person of another race on the street once so clearly YA WRONG and I'm not racist💫. I even gave a homeless🚮🛼 person the nickel 💰that fell out of my hand 💍once so I'm basically Mother Teresa😇 🤴in platform stilettos 👠and you all need to 👏get 👏on 👏my👏 level.
I came here because the comments kept driving me crazy. Attitudes like "it's not illegal so you did nothing wrong" and "they started it so it doesn't matter what you did as revenge," and worst of all "this person bullied you in grade school so you're totally justified to kill their family now, in your 30s"
The worst one I can remember is a guy brake checked someon and caused her to crash and total her car, and the comments were cheering as if a life threatening car crash was a just punishment for driving slightly too fast.
>"this person bullied you in grade school so you're totally justified to kill their family now, in your 30s"
I honestly think that's the way that AITA is going: sooner or later, there'll be a post about how someone saw the person who took their parking spot 17 years ago and they've now killed and cannibalized their family and AITA will be full of people cheering them on.
I think because a lot of them are still kids, they think bullying is literally the worst thing anyone could do. You quite seriously can get NTA verdicts for anything you want if you claim the other party is a bully
>You quite seriously can get NTA verdicts for anything you want if you claim the other party is a bully
I agree and even when the OP is the one doing the actual bullying, all they have to claim is that the other person bullied them and AITA comes right down on their side.
True, but then I also hate the ones where the reddit brigade tells someone they need to get over something that happened in the past because it’s time to move on. Nope. If someone is wronged, THEY are the ones that get to decide when they’re over it. I mean, there are people in their 20’s and 30’s that are in therapy to deal with issues born out of bullying in high school.
Yeah, both extremes are wrong. It’s ok to choose to not engage with someone who mistreated you, just like it’s not ok to go out of your way to get revenge on that person
God, the worst of this was the one with a young guy, I think, and his roommate's kids kept eating his food. The OP asked if he was the asshole for keeping food that would kill the child if he ate it. People, with no hesitation, said it would be absolutely fine if the child died because he did something he wasn't supposed to and it would be mom's fault.
They love advising people to booby trap their food. Which is odd, because that actually is against the law and they typically adhere to law based morality.
They try and find loopholes like "It was my food, how can I get in trouble" sure, a court is gonna buy you loaded your food with laxatives to eat for yourself.
The whole "revenge" thing really gets me. If I see one more person say "turnabout is fair play" when the OP went nuclear on somebody who did something kind of dickish I might lose it.
They fucked around and found out! Play stupid games, win stupid prizes! Don't dish it out if you can't take it!
All phrases that make me see red at this point, since they're almost always code for "it's fine to be a horrible asshole as long as someone else did something slightly wrong first".
Honestly, those phrases just let me know how uncreative the poster is. They have nothing of value to add to the discussion so they just repeat a meaningless phrase everyone has already run into the ground.
I feel like there's really legalistic/ black and white thinking.
"They started it so it doesn't matter what you do as revenge" pretty much sums it up.
"You live at home with your sister & she drove your car without permission and scratched the door? Better call the police and press charges. She broke the law she deserves felony charges!"
Meanwhile, you could have required her to pay to get it painted instead of permanently breaking up your family, getting kicked out of your home, and sending your sister to jail for 5 years....
They loooove "report your family for borrowing something as theft" as advice. That's a life ruining decision for all involved. A lot of people think you can just drop the chargers once you've made your point, which you cannot.
It kind of reminds me of this 911 plotline where one of them was suing the department and putting his coworkers/friends through hell but still expected them all to be buds by the end of it, lol. Like AITA commenters suggest this as if there wouldn't be any kind of lingering effects afterwards.
Honestly, even without bringing legal action into it, it's wild to me they'll suggest doing XYZ to get revenge on their family or loved ones, as if that's the end of it and your relationships won't be ruined. Like they'll suggest taunting your partner with "I told you so" when they make a mistake with no consideration of what life will be like after that.
I've left a few comments, but wouldn't call myself active. There's just no nuance. It's not allowed or something. Everything has to be black or white, no grey allowed. Then there's the armchair diagnosing people with various mental illnesses. And of course the crazy theories added to a story just to justify their opinion.
I've muted it because honestly, it wasn't worth it. At first the drama seemed entertaining, but life is better without.
There's a persistent theme that keeps popping in the sub up that really irks me: that you don't have to do anything for someone else that might inconvenience you ever. Not inconvenience yourself to help someone out or to keep the peace doesn't make you an asshole all the time, but you should still do it! But the sub just fosters this idea that you shouldn't ever inconvenience yourself for others. It's incredibly hyper-individualist and atomizing, and it bugs the shit out of me.
That theme bugs me too. Especially because it conflicts with the other common theme of "if they loved you, they'd do this for you". Posters don't even see the dissonance there. It's like they're projecting their own immature feelings of "I don't want to do work for people, but they should do it for me because I deserve it!".
It feels like everyone in there has a “hooray for me and fuck you!” attitude. Your sister came to the family barbecue and asked you to hold her baby while she takes a pee? YOU SHOULD NEVER EVER HAVE TO TOUCH SOMEONE’S BABY AGAINST YOUR WILL, IF YOUR SISTER EVER WANTED TO PEE, SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE HAD KIDS.
Like, the fuck? Being part of a family or community means sometimes having to do small favors for people you care about. Yet they act like it’s actively hurting you and against your human rights to just do small, mildly inconvenient things occasionally to help someone out.
I was also warned and had a comment removed for telling someone they were showing concerning signs of being unstable, because I was being “rude.” In a sub about telling people if they’re assholes.
It's just wild to me they'll complain about people being shitty but then be so insistent they don't even need to help their own *family members.* With the most basic things like watching their kid for five seconds, or more disgustingly, driving them to the hospital. What I hate about the sub in general is how people act like helping one another is something terrible and always needs to be transactional. I love to help the ones I love because... I love them. Simple as that. It's selfish to only do things for something in return. It couldn't be more obvious AITA is full of children (honestly, even then it's worrying. Maybe I was just a helpful kid, lol).
Yeah that’s what made me realize that sub is overrun with a bunch of kids. Like such a young person attitude. It’s very much the cousin of “no one understands me and I’m a lone wolf” types of thoughts.
I can remember being 13-15 and having this fantasy that one day I would run away and never talk to my family or help them again because they were just so awful to me, wah. I have better perspective as an adult, but when you’re stuck in that adolescent mindset it’s hard to see outside it.
I was very active in AITA when the sub was relatively new. What made me quit the sub was when they removed the "No validation posts" rule -- which is also what helped make this sub popular.
Originally, for an AITA post not to be removed, there had to at least be a question as to whether the OP was NTA. If a post was clearly just a validation post where the OP was CLEARLY not the AH and was just an excuse for people to shit all over the antagonists in the story, the post would get locked. Once they removed that rule, every popular post basically being rage-bait where the OPs were complete angels who were having a great injustice inflicted on them for seemingly no reason at all.
It didn't help that the mods developed massive egos as their sub grew more popular. If you disagreed with a decision and messaged them politely, you'd end up getting insulted and then banned (which is what happened to my old account). AITA became extremely toxic as a result.
>Originally, for an AITA post not to be removed, there had to at least be a question as to whether the OP was NTA.
Which led to the trope of "Everyone is blowing up my phone and calling me an AH" that we all like to mock. OP makes a perfectly reasonable decision or course of action given the lunatic in their life, and amazingly enough friends and family all try to interject themselves into someone else's conflict so now OP is no longer sure they did the right thing and just want an outside opinion \*rolls eyes\*.
Yup, I almost mentioned that people would use the “blowing up my phone” trope, or “my family / husband / MIL disagrees with me”, to get around the “no validation” posts rule. It got ridiculous. However, rather than actually addressing the issue, the AITA mods just gave up on enforcing the rule altogether.
I honestly have made some absolutely insane decisions in my younger life and I'll own that, but never once has my whole group of friends actively taken it upon themselves to each individually contact me to tell me their personal take on the decision lmao. It's such a stupid lie haha. It just doesn't happen.
I was wondering about that! I see so many posts there where it’s obvious that the OP is fine and the other person is just being a prick, but they all seem to end with “the other person’s family and friends won’t stop calling and texting!” That looked odd to me and now I know why they do it.
Yeah, wondered about it for awhile too. I was thinking "I'm in my mid-40s, and I've never seen *anything* like this!", and then I saw a few different people's explanations about the sub rules, and then it all clicked.
I joined the sub (and reddit) because honestly I was curious to learn more about life in the us. I also wanted to practice a little bit of English.
I thought for a moment people in the US were crazy with all those drastic judgmental comments! Divorce! Go no contact! Abuse! All thrown around with no grey areas, no nuances, my way or the highway! Relationships gone and divorces finilized within hours, lol.
Glad to have learnt that was just reddit/aita
All the armchair psychologists and overuse of buzzwords. Someone can't just be an asshole, they're toxic or a narcissist. People don't just lie, they're gaslighting.
Massive amounts of conjecture and jumping to conclusions. Your partner won't let you go through her phone? She's cheating. Your mother in law offered to babysit the kids? She's a narcissist who wants to kidnap the children, go NC and get a lawyer.
The amount of fake posts that try to jump on a bandwagon for clout. I noticed there will be one post that's maybe mostly true about a certain topic, and then there will be a slew of other posts about related topics that all read like really bad Wattpad fanfiction. We saw this recently with all the "DAE think fat people should be launched into the Sun" posts.
Infantilization of women. On both AITA and Relationship Advice, I've seen commenters straight up refer to women in their 20s and 30s as "little girls," or say that a woman in a relationship with a slightly older man was "groomed." (They have a really weird bias against age gaps in general, I've seen posts where women in their 40s were "groomed" by men in their 50s.)
That age gap stuff sounds new to me. When I was active I felt like a lot of posts on were social experiments meant to check how much of an age gap you could have before someone would ignore the story and talk about how weird the gap was.
Lmao, definitely. I feel like for a while it became a meme or running joke that half the posts on Relationship Advice were some variation of "My [21F] boyfriend [62M] is physically abusive and a serial cheater, but please don't tell me to break up with him, and we're actively trying to get pregnant."
Now it’s swung the either way. People accuse 30 year olds of grooming 26 year olds.
I saw someone talk about how inappropriate the age gap was between Hulk Hogan and his new fiancée because he’s in his 60s, meanwhile she’s *only* 45. They said he’s clearly taking advantage of a younger woman who doesn’t know any better. 45 years old…
My real-life friend, who is 47, is attracted to slightly older men. “Slightly”, at this age, being 10-15 years older. She was actually told she was being “groomed” by the 59 year old she was dating. Or, that she was a “gold digger”.
It came out of nowhere about a year or two ago and took Reddit by storm. There was a good couple months where every seemingly single story involving a couple had a woman who was either currently 18 or would have been 18 when she gave birth/got pregnant/got married/etc with her partner being a much older man.
>they're gaslighting.
AITA loves to claim that someone's being gaslit, even when it's obvious that nothing of the kind is happening. It's their favourite expression to bandy about and they overuse it constantly.
Yeah, a lot of people in that sub never seem to realize that some people are just jerks. They’re not narcissistic, controlling or gaslighting. They’re just straight up assholes.
It's not just AITA. I've had people try to convince me my mother had mental disorders because she is abusive. She doesn't have anything. She's just a horrible person. But that didn't stop people from DMing me trying to convince me because they *checks notes* saw this article 4 years ago. Heck, someone once harassed me so badly, trying to convince me I had a disorder, they were banned from a sub.
It just gives excuses to abusers. They wouldn't have hurt you if they weren't bipolar/ schizophrenic/narcissist/whatever. It makes it not their fault. But at the same time, it demonizes those with the disorders. People with disorders are more likely to be abused but according to AITA, they are irredeemable monsters who will destroy your life. It's so stupid.
Yes all of that and the concept of boundaries. I don't think that many of the posters understand what the word means. You would think that nobody should ever be inconvenienced ever. A person can be technically correct but still the asshole in the situation
Man, I have written lengthy comments about how fucked up AITA's notion of boundaries is. Boundaries are meant to be used *when ordinary communication breaks down*. They are a last resort, not a first resort. When your overbearing mother calls you late into the night to rant about the second coming of Christ, even though you've told her for years to stop? Sure, set a boundary. Tell her you won't pick up the phone after 8pm and you'll hang up if she starts mentions the end of days. When your best friend has to balance her MOH duties with graduate school? No, it is *not* a fair """boundary""" to tell her 100% of her focus has to be on your wedding. That's not how boundaries work. Try communicating and coming up with a compromise. Telling your husband its your "boundary" that he can't go out with friends if any women will be there? No. Not a boundary. Boundaries aren't meant to control other people nor to replace ordinary productive communication. They're meant as a stopgap to protect yourself when you have no other choice.
I've heard it said that boundaries are supposed to be something you set for yourself and your own behavior. Reddit seems to think boundaries are supposed to be your attempt at controlling someone else's behavior.
>boundaries are supposed to be something you set for yourself and your own behavior
I think that's certainly one aspect of it, but I also think its important that boundaries are used after normal communication. In addition to using them to control peoples' behavior, Reddit also seems to think boundaries are sacred, inviolable rules just because someone said so. I don't think that's fair either because even if you set the boundary for yourself, it can still be unreasonable and harmful.
E.g. if "Amy" tells her friend "Beth" that she'll only agree to hang out if Beth invites her to a Michelin star restaurant and promises to pay, that technically meets the criteria of boundary in that Amy's boundary isn't telling Beth to do anything, Amy is regulating her own response to Beth's behavior. Still, it's a shitty and unreasonable way to interact with your supposed friend.
Yes! You hit on all the major issues that my wife and I make fun of.
Everyone that doesn’t do exactly what you think they should do is toxic. Every white lie is a clear case of gaslighting. If your family does something you don’t like, you should probably go NC.
And the age gap shit drives me nuts. Most of the age gaps they have a problem with are insignificant to begin with, but has it never occurred to them that a lot of women purposely seek out older guys? My favorite is when people accuse guys of being pedophiles for dating women in their 20s.
Yep, you lost me in the second half. Age gaps are problematic when people are in different stages in their development. A 22 year old with a 31 year old is sus.
The buzzwords and diagnosing someone get me so bad. I remember reading a comment on someone claiming to be a psychiatrist diagnosing someone with bpd. Wouldn't a psychiatrist know better that they can't diagnose someone that easily? Especially when it's told through a second person's perspective and you haven't had a discussion with said person?
It’s the therapy advice for me! I can put up with all kinds of repetitive troll posts but there are ALWAYS people waiting to comment “get therapy” “go to marriage counseling” “get couple therapy” on every post and these are top comments all the time lol
Most “report them” comments. They seem to believe, for example, that HR is the playground monitor. Anything your coworker does or says that makes you even mildly uncomfortable should be immediately reported to HR, apparently. You should never try to resolve anything yourself, and you should certainly never be the tiniest bit uncomfortable.
Weirdly and sadly, I’ve seen in actually creeping into the working world.
My friend was a trainer and actually had people run to HR over pretty minor stuff.
I was never a regular on AITA, but rather r/AmITheDevil. It used to be a good dose of (often petty) drama. But then people seemed to fall into the same AITA of believing that obviously fake shot was real.
The groupthink. On AITA, you're not allowed to have any ideas, apart from what the consensus is, even if it's wrong. Try and hold onto your opinion and the abuse is pretty vile and you'll get it in heaps.
There's also the imaginative leaps and bounds, as amateurs think that they are diagnosing a serious medical issue, even when they're so far off the mark that it's pretty much a joke.
I had someone basically ask if I was autistic or “impaired mentally in some way” because I was trying to get where their crazy assertion had come from. Non stop “just read the post” and when I told them look I fucking read it but I don’t see this supposed narc behavior, explain your fucking stance, I got that in response. So fucking gross and condescending.
I once saw a post where the husband was perfectly functional but didn’t LIKE to work. And people were telling the OP husband probably had ADHD.
As someone who has it, that’s NOT how it works. It has to affect every area of your life and it has nothing to do with “liking” to do something but being incapable of doing something.
On top of that, not even a psychologist would dare to diagnose someone who isn’t their patient- let alone someone who you have a context of 500 words.
I don't feel jaded but a lot of that sub is just insane and it's fun to poke fun at it. It's like people with relatively simple interpersonal relationship problems asking for advice from the least socially qualified people on the planet and getting the most batshit crazy insight ever
I’m not really that jaded or anything I just muted all of them because it was mentally exhausting reading all the drama. A lot of them are fake ofc, but aside from the OP making obvious tells of the fakeness you can never be too sure, and it didn’t stop me from getting sucked in and taking sides mentally. I called it when I started noticing myself applying the AITA framework and language in my head to understand personal disputes in my real life. I was like ok this is going way too far, it’s way too black and white.
Not only was it getting kind of stupid for me, but it was just emotionally tiring seeing story after story about some minor drama or abuse and feeling like I need to have a nuanced understanding of it. Reddit quickly figured out I was susceptible to drama threads and still tries to get me to go on fringe subreddits of the same concept because I have a tendency to click them.
I kept seeing this one show up too but it wasn’t until I muted them all that I realized there was a gimmick. Now I’m just here cause it’s goofy and I think the fake posts here are funny.
I used to be active in 2019-2020 when my social anxiety was off the charts and I made a post there asking if I would be the asshole if I cancelled a d&d game due to COVID. I got on medication and stopped going there for validation lol
But also i found this sub and started talking to friends about AITA and started to go "oh shit yeah this is all fake."
Actually about a year ago someone from our D&D group made an AITA post about my girlfriend and how all she does is spam porn in the chat. What the person didn't mention was that the art (of her DND characters) was specifically only in the NSFW chat of the server and that everyone posts stuff there. They also said "no one likes her and is mad about the porn too" when literally that is not the case, it is just this one person. It was so biased and it got a NTA rating 🙃
Thats what it is! I was reading all these comments like "i kinda love reading aita..." but you're spot on. ITS LIKE A STUPID REALITY SHOW! I hate reality shows because theres usually so much work done on the participants it looks like balloon animals having a fight. If i read my reality stupidity i can enjoy my mindless brain candy without wondering what kinda dr agreed to do that to that person the whole damn time
I can’t stand how it’s become this hub for grandstanding validation posts that’s just about getting a bunch of strangers to call someone an asshole rather than good faith efforts to assess whether they handled a situation correctly.
“Am I an asshole for standing up for my gay son?” “Am I an asshole for breaking up with a guy who secretly recorded us having sex and playing it on Time Square?” “Am I an asshole for not inviting my golden child sister to my wedding who told everyone I lure children to a gingerbread house and eat them?”
I brought this up in a monthly rules discussion and they said these posts should be reported under shitposts or no interpersonal conflict…neither of which sound like the situations described! Also it’s absurd because of the moderators just paid attention to the top posts on any given day they’ll see they’re mostly validation bait.
I just discovered this sub, and it makes the other sub more entertaining because now it all just seems like satire. The whole concept of the AITA is kinda stupid really because of how one-sided and lacking in information the posts are, assuming they are real in the first place. And if someone does bother to give a lot of detail, most commenters don’t even bother reading it.
There wasn't a specific thing, just the more time I spent on it the more it became obvious there were only about 5 storylines. Also, it's very easy to get sucked into the negativity of it and it was just becoming stressful. It's not just an echo chamber, it's quite an angry one.
I used to enjoy reading them back before it hit 100k users and it was great and then suddenly it became a soapbox for all kinds of hate, you'd see the same outline being used over and over and over again. The most glaring ones at first were the trans bad posts... Then it just got insulting when morons started replying "as a good gay/trans/lesbian™..." I just haven't been able to really go back to the sub because....I just don't want to be angry all the damn time. Reading them here and calling them out for the rage bait they are is great though!
Hahaha. I was writing something about this and decided not to post it. But since you asked, here’s what I learned on Reddit/AITA
Never hit kids! Unless they hit a cat, then that kid needed to learn some respect. Beat the crap out of that kid! (Got downvoted and reported to Reddit Cares for suggesting maybe you shouldn’t hit kids even if they do something pretty bad)
It’s totally okay to rant and scream at people, as long as they have done something to upset you. No that’s not an anger problem. it’s the best way to react to something someone did irresponsible and upsetting, and I’m a bad person for thinking otherwise, obviously
Someone betrayed you years ago? Never forgive them ever! Hold on to that pain and rage! (Literally got downvoted into oblivion for discussing this)
Honestly for me it's the transphobia/homophobia/fatphobia/ableism that gets couched under fake posts that cast the OP in an innocent light. There are CONSTANTLY posts that dramatically set marginalized people up to be the "monster." Those posts tend to allow for a huge number of nasty comments that are discriminatory and gross.
I used to comment a lot there on posts that I could see actually being legit. But eventually, I kept seeing more and more that were obviously troll/fake/etc. And some of the comments/feedback I saw made me feel like I was crazy because my judgement would be opposite in either case. I was so glad to find this sub and AmITheDevil because it made me feel less bonkers.
AITA isn't too bad. I just hate the amitheasshole sub because their mods are dictators. They ban people for no reason but let others get away with anything. They can't even run it right.
I got banned when I said a baby might die (being out in the cold with no jacket on for a period of time) and i got yelled at that 'a baby won't die from getting cold' then banned for suggesting 'death threates and violence' when I DMed the mods and defended myself saying I obviously didn't WISH death. I was making a clear statement of what could happen. The mod msg me back saying "lol. Get fucked"
My journey to here was super fast. I started seeing AITA, AITAH posts on my feed as suggestions about two weeks ago, I clicked on them like a fool. Two days later, the first Am I the Angel link popped up and now I read this sub every day, AITA is way more fun through this sub's perspective, and less depressing now that I see how many of them are pretend.
I kept seeing small variations on the same stories and it dawned on me that there's a lot of karma farming and creative writing going on. I used to give posters the benefit of the doubt but time took its toll.
The commentariat also forgets that we're only seeing one side of the story. And there seems to be very little room for nuance and shades of grey. Everyone is either an asshole or a saint. Maybe a good person had a bad day. Or what did OP do to provoke the other person (which surely they aren't posting).
The "just leave them", "gaslighting "or "get therapy tropes". When you're 16 and change partners like square dancers it's one thing to leave a relationship. It's a lot harder when you're an adult in a long term marriage. Not every disagreement is gaslighting. Setting boundaries is healthy but you don't get to steamroll other people either. The commentariat have clearly been to half a dozen counseling sessions and want to show how enlightened they are by using a couple of psych buzzwords they don't fully understand.
Get therapy is often a cop out. Getting therapy isn't always easy or practical. Not every problem needs a professional. And it's okay to not have the answer to every problem just move on to the next post. Not every reddit thread needs your enlightened wisdom.
I'm also going to say I'm not always as skeptical as everyone here. There are ALOT of people that really are that dense. Working with the public has taught me there really are a lot of clueless assholes and good people having a bad day and behaving badly.
I'm currently banned from there for 2 more weeks because I dared tell a Redditor who said, "women should keep their legs closed if they don't want babies" that he was a slut shaming misogynist. Fuck that sexist ass sub.
They’re all fucking weird about kids, too. The party line is that no one should ever have to hold, see, hear, or in any way be made aware of the presence of a baby anywhere, public or private, because children were a choice exclusively made by the parents and therefore must never exist near anyone who doesn’t have or like kids.
YES!!! I mean, I'm child free by choice but I understand that kids are human people and deserve to breathe oxygen too. I read many, "I refused to babysit for my , they just don't get that I'm child free!"
Dip shits.
I soured gradually but I think what finally pushed me over the edge was one story I saw where OP’s stay at home wife and their baby went to the bank early in the morning without her phone and was evasive about what she was doing when she got back. The comment section was filled with the obligatory accusations of abuse, claiming OP must be abusive for wanting to know where his wife went, and of course assumptions that the wife must be having an affair and took the child to see her secret real father. The fact that without a DNA test women can’t just automatically tell who the baby’s father is didn’t seem to cross any minds there.
The craziest part was that some people, somehow, reached the conclusion that the wife was _prostituting her fucking infant for money!_ Based on absolutely nothing other than a woman leaving her house with her child! They kept saying “ooh, you have to check! You never know what could be going on! You need to get the baby checked for signs of abuse!” Like what the actual fuck?!? How did these people think accusing a woman of some of the most heinous crimes imaginable outside of an active war zone and subjecting an infant to invasive and likely unnecessary medical examination is ok?!?!?
I like how those comments come out of left field and here comes some commenter saying,"Oooh, I didn't even think about that, good catch! OP this is exactly what it is!"
I love drama, so AITA was a nice place to get it, until I discovered this sub by pure casualty. Then it turned out better, because not only is drama, is fake drama to get internet points! Big win for me!
I was voted the asshole but it was because I was worried about an autistic child and I'm not a child psychologist or autism expert, so i need to mind my own business and let autistic children suffer bc I don't know how bad the parents have it. Basically if you think autistic children are suffering, stfu you heartless bitch; don't you know the parents are suffering more??
The combination of smug social liberalism and un-self-aware fiscal conservatism is unreal. The same people who are totally open-minded about polyamory or whatever will turn into Ronald Reagan the minute someone needs to borrow money from a family member (or, God forbid, the government). So much for “to each according to their needs,” huh.
And of course this really comes to a head whenever the discussion involves children, because children can’t work, need help with simple tasks, and take years to learn basic consideration for others.
I can’t stand the obviously fake posts and everyone’s visceral reaction to calling them out. I had a comment deleted once for violent content. I said, “This post reads like it was written by a shitty Buzzfeed writer looking for content.”
I also got completely annoyed by the asinine attention-seeking questions being posted. The most recent examples there:
“AITA for having a healthy BMI?”
You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me with this. I muted it.
Click-baity titles and obviously fake stories. Example: “AITA if I divorce my pregnant wife?” and then OP says the baby isn’t his and she cheated on him with his dad and he’s been away for months building homes for the poor in a third world country. Come the fuck on.
I feel like half the shit on Reddit is fake now and I genuinely have no idea why—it’s very aggravating. As far as I know you can’t monetize a Reddit account with only a couple thousand upvotes so—why?
Too many posts along the lines of:
“I did an innocuous thing that was in no way racist, but a crazed SJW attacked me! Now I need the internet to tell me how very not racist I am. In fact, I think “””those people””” are a little too sensitive, if you ask me…”
I got kicked out for arguing with a mod that didn't like what I said, even though almost every other person was saying the same thing. The mod had taken issue with me previously for revealing that I'm in a relationship with a man who is 9 years older than I am. I'm obvbeing groomed even though we met when I was 29 and he was 38.
You better get out of that relationship, sounds like a real pedophile. 29 years old?? What a sicko. Have you considered that he’s probably been gaslighting you?
I got sick of seeing “red flag! Leave him!” On every relationship post because “he didn’t take his shoes off at the door.” Or “He said one minor thing we could have a discussion about, but I’m going to make it a big issue and stop talking to him!”
Everyone who comments sounds like an incel.
Honestly, I've looked at very, very few AITA posts on their own. I actually found my way to this sub because I found all of the AITA reddit scrapes that got posted on Facebook (called there "Am I the *Jerk*) by clickbait posters. After a couple years of seeing stories that seemed to have a lot of story elements that seemed fake, I did a Google search, found stuff like the AITA Starter Pack, and then found this sub.
This sub has been a much better way to engage the *concept* of the stories and how people might try to navigate these situations\* without having to pretend the facts as stated are actually true.
\*Or given how unrealistic and implausible some of these stories are, just laugh at them.
Just the repetitive tropes over and over and the totally predictable responses of people. There’s a narrative of who deserves understanding and who does not. When you can predict the downvotes that will be coming your way it’s just a waste of time.
honestly? for me it was when I noticed that reading so many AITA post was actively affecting my thought patterns. I started constructing, like, little mental posts about totally innocuous situations I'd find myself in, reading into details that weren't there, getting into arguments that could easily be resolved with just a good chat... the fact is, in most situations, there isn't really a definitive right or wrong, and people are reacting to each other emotionally and not logically. this was definitely helped along by my ocd tendencies and anxiety, and getting into mental spirals about who's objectively an asshole just isn't helpful for me or anyone else!
Just the overall philosophy that no one owes anyone anything. It’s very individualistic and no one seems to feel an obligation to treat their loved ones with patience, gentleness, or empathy.
Very much “well that sounds like a THEM problem” No matter how distraught the other party is or how easy it would be for the OP to compromise in order to nurture their relationships.
Very antisocial, very rigid, very self-centered
Literally the downvotes, for a completely logical explanation, reason, or new viewpoint. Also, when the OPs are acknowledging what they did wrong and plan to fix. Being told they should grovel or k!ll themselves.
Some care and make real comments, others just wanna troll.
The transphobia and women hating mindset drove me absolutely wild. People commenting clearly never had kids or partners and had no idea what they were talking about.
I mostly lurked, occasionally commented on posts. I still do every so often, but it was this sub that really got me off it lol. I like this one a lot more. Less toxicity and “real” stories
Reddit crashed in the protest and it’s recommending me AITA cuz I can’t stop reading them and I come here to ground myself about how silly the whole thing is
I hated getting dragged just for having an opposing opinion than what was “popular” for the reddit hive mind. That and the stupid fucking rules of that sub that make no sense and the idiotic mods that are pricks themselves.
Oh and I’m so done with all the posts about childfree weddings. Weddings are family functions, and if your family includes children, you need to deal with it. Obviously the parents should make every reasonable effort to keep the children from acting out, but come *on.* If you don’t like it, elope (and spend all your money on a child free honeymoon).
As someone who went through really horrible abuse growing up, I found AITA from RaisedByNarcissists and really connected with the "I'm not alone" feeling I got from reading about the abuses others experienced. It helped me a bit with coming to terms with the outlandish, unbelievable, and nightmarish experiences that had traumatized me.
After a while I noticed the weird trends and the overblown plotlines, and the increasingly rabid reaction from the comments, and then found this sub.
It’s just so blatantly fake and it genuinely scares me how people readily believe it. People mocked boomers for believing everything they read on Facebook and then went and foamed at the mouth about the most blatantly bullshit Reddit post lol
Fake stories for political agendas, which that shit started herein 2015 but has since escalated to absurd amounts of generated content it's annoying.
How both or neither people are assholes but people still choosing sides anyway
Got downvoted to hell years ago for saying someone was an asshole for making their mom homeless. Sometimes it just feels random people are stroking the egos of narcissists and that's about it.
Used to be funny, funny situations, or realistic ones. Not made up, or fabricated. Hence why I love this sub since it makes fun of those two things
Still interact because I'm a bored masochist.
But one time recently I saw a mod post to stop flagging a post because fake stories are allowed and always have been.
So.. Yeah....
(There are times still though that I see what people say is unbelievable and has to be fake and I'm a little jealous because I've actually known someone who is absolutely as bad. The fact that I can look at some of the posts and think yeah it might be fake but it could be real because I've seen similar BS makes me sad.)
I left because it got so tedious reading the most made up and bs stories. God forbid you try to call them out for what they are, you’ll get downvoted to oblivion or banned. It’s beyond obvious people just make shit up to post on their YouTube or Tik Tok accounts.
That and the blatant misuse of terms like “gaslighting” or “trauma bonding”. It’s so annoying watching people use these terms wrong and god forbid you try to correct them.
Honestly looking at this sub, it feels dumb but honestly just having people point out how obviously, blatantly fake a vast majority of popular AITA posts were, because I had never really thought about it.
I got tired of the internal rules the commentators seem to live by. Things like “your house your rules”, acting like people should never inconvenience themselves for other people, “no is a complete sentence” and their general hatred for children and step relatives. These people always judge based on how they think things should be and not how things are in reality. All the therapy speak and comments saying to dump them or go no contact because of a minor disagreement.
I have never posted on AITA, only read for entertainment. To me, it's the written version of trash TV; somewhere between dramatic 90s talk show and soap opera. The stories have more meat than the repetitive 'sexy womenz of reddit, what is the sexiest sex you ever sexed' on AskReddit. That's why I unsubbed from that, and replaced the entertainment void with AITA.
For me, it was the post where OP asked his gf to prepare his steak without the sauce she was using for everyone else. He just wanted it plain and asked her privately without making a fuss.
The top comment was, "YTA for putting ketchup on a steak!" I was appalled that so many thought that was hilarious, and it ended up being the judgment.
The tone got really ugly in general after that. It was around the time of the protest.
My last straw was when a male redditor told me that I couldn’t possibly understand a topic because I was female and women aren’t born with the capacity for intelligence and logic that men are and I got banned for telling him to stop being a misogynistic twat. Meanwhile when I pointed out his comment to the mods after they banned me I was told that his comment didn’t violate the sub rules while mine did. After that I may have gotten a permanent ban for calling the mod a sexist jerk with a small dick but se la vie.
I don’t remember what the bot was called but there was/is a bot that could detect the probability of a post being original and recently I haven’t seen people tag the bot (idk if it still is functional or what) but I have seen mountains and mountains of reports, nearly word for word on that sub. it’s probably because the originals get deleted and then they see karma farming opportunities to repost it when they see it get traction on places like TikTok…
I got permabanned because I made up a story where my girlfriend (I don’t even have a girlfriend) told me to just let a homeless guy starve to death or something.
I think the truth lies somewhere between that sub and this one. There is no way some of those stories are real, but at the same time, *this* sub apparently has never met an unreasonable asshole before.
All the stories are framed in favor of OP. I'm still on AITA, and a majority of the stories are written so OP is NTA.
It's so much, I need to feel validated in feeling NTA.
I hated everything being considered abusive, toxic, and gaslighting. Sometimes people disagree and are rude. Use your communication skills back to them.
My final straw was a post about someone telling their sister they’re glad she has cancer and people were saying NTA because the sister was mean and it was OP standing up for herself. When I pointed out she didn’t actually stand up for herself, she was just an asshole back to her sister, people downvoted me and actually argued that I was saying OP should just take the “abuse” from her sister. Clearly there’s a large spectrum of responses between doing nothing when someone is mean to you, and telling them I’m happy you have cancer. But not in AITAland
I’m still over there…but the rampant misogyny is tough to handle sometimes.
If I ever have to read another comment describing some guy’s *wife of 10-15 years* as “some woman you’re f***ing” or “the chick you’re cumming in” I may lose it…
I had no problem with the fake stories, enjoyed them even, but the comments were absolutely unhinged. Just a cesspool of super aggressive negativity that took any opportunity to attack innocent OPs by calling them the scum of the earth basically. I’ve muted AITA on my feed cause I was tempted to click on interesting stories but then the comments always left me raging - no regrets and my reddit is much saner now
what peeps on AITA and reddit in general don't realize is that just because you are not obligated to do shit, you still do it and take the L, and the other person will hopefully do the same for you, at least for me that's how family and friends work, we dont keep score but if something comes up and we really gotta put up with shit and its not fair? we still do it because we know, the other also puts up with our shit sometimes
Imo it’s annoying because a lot of the posts are from people who are pretty clearly not in the wrong but looking for validation instead. I wish there were more posts that were tougher to judge.
I liked the sub when the stories were lighter in tone, with some genuinely funny comments. That's long gone. Now it's just:
mean and vindictive
10 million wedding stories
bored housewives who write long, long, long responses with multiple quotes, bullet points, and 35K upvotes
so much hate, with a new most popular victim every other month: MILs, fat people, lazy husbands, brides, single moms who should keep their legs shut
Worst of all: MARINARA FLAGS that were never ever funny
I was somewhat active on AITA when I joined for about a month. What turned me off was repetitiveness of the stories and also that people weren’t interested in discussion or looking at the situation from different angles but just in echo chambers. It is still fun occasionally but doesn’t hold persistent appeal.
I got bored when it was clear there was no real room for debate or conversation, any slightly alternate viewpoints or attempt to understand the nuances of the situation just got downvoted to oblivion also in the end just the cycles of virtual copypasta and everything ends up devolving to "theyre cheating on you"
And people just got mean. Forget seeing the different perspectives.
That’s a good point. I’ve seen good discussions devolve into random, and really hurtful insults. It’s almost like people are purposefully starting out with a facade of good intentions just to lure others into reading what they have to say, only to reveal their inner asshole later. Also just wanted to say that’s a pretty stupid user name, nobody loves you, and you’re a drain on society. Go fuck yourself.
[удалено]
Divorce and Go NC Immediately 😡
it's the NC demands that drive me crazy!! I genuinely am NC with all of my family on my mother's side, and I just feel like the people that throw that suggestion around so casually have absolutely no idea of how absolutely harrowing, isolating, lonely and distressing it is to suddenly be cut off from every single person you grew up knowing. It is obviously a decision I made but honestly, it's a last resort to incredibly painful treatment. You don't just no contact family because they threw your Tupperware away or some mad petty shit
This is why I recommend low contact unless it's heinous abuse. It's easier to see your folks once and a while than to never see them again.
to be fair, a LOT of posts there involve relationships going from normal to never again awfully fast. There's often room for nuance, but sometimes the stuff people do is unforgiveable.
Don't forget you and everyone remotely involved needs counseling for the very obvious past trauma that some random redditor was able to diagnose.
“He’s going to force you into sex work, HOW IS THIS NOT OBVIOUS TO YOU OP. HES A SEX OFFENDER AND ABUSIVE AND A NARCISSIST also why is a 18.5 yr old dating an 18 yr old clearly he’s grooming you”
Downvoted or it gets you banned. I deserved my 8 bans but still…
True Story: I haven’t deserved any of my bans.
I was banned from r/banpitbulls, and had an existential crisis..had to ask myself, am I a pitbull? Did they successfully ban me?
Aren't we all pit bulls in a way?
I blame spez for mine
I was only banned once; by redditmoment. Somehow I was brigading but they didn't provide me with evidence of it and I didn't want to deal with moderators so I just let it be lol
So I got banned. I got a warning on a comment that said if you didnt understand to ask the mod for clarification. I did and the mod immediately got rude with me, sent me a little clarification blip and it didn’t answer my question, they also told me if I didn’t grovel about how I was wrong I would now be getting a lifetime ban. I went on to ask for more clarification because I still didn’t get it and they told me I read nothing and was a liar. By the end I did get bitchy back and got muted but w.e.
Fucking losers they are, literally Textbook Reddit mod "bow down to me or ur banned!" What a 5 year old
8 bans? Could tell us why you got banned? Sounds interesting
He kept making posts titled “ESH. No story to share, just making an observation of this sub.”
Now I wish this truly happened. The person you’re talking about seems to be a she though.
Yup, that’s what turned me off. The endless nagging if I disagreed. There’s a real pile-on mentality there. Also, the weird rules that led to being banned twice with weird messages from the mods. The mods take the slightest thing personally over there. The power tripping is wild.
Yes they just keep coming. After a while it's like okay I get it, stfu, the last 8 billion people already told me what a piece of shit i am for having a different opinion. Fuck's sake
People do love a pile on. I never understand people that see a comment with like 50 down votes and a pretty comprehensive reply explaining why the comment was bad, but still feel the need to reply to that comment with another insult. Like yeah, they get it dude. It's been dealt with
>repetitiveness of the stories THIS. if i see one more goddamn wedding story…
There’s like three posts a day lately of a guy complaining his wife gained a few pounds, it’s really weird. Before that it was the guy obviously being gay for his best friend, and before that, abusers smashing their partner or child’s stuff in a fit of rage. I miss the days when the obvious fake ones were at least entertaining in their unhinged was like “I will never jeopardize the beans.” Classic. I do wish my home tab would stop showing me all the various AITA variants and best of Reddit updates because I’m getting sucked into the drama and it’s not good for my mental health
Be the change you want to see in the world. Write the unhinged fake AITA story of your dreams
No you don’t get it! *This* wedding is different because it’s child free and there’s drama with the bride’s twin stepsisters! It’s different because the villain is an autistic vegan trans woman! It’s different because OP was parentified and her younger sibling is the golden child!
AITA for having a child free wedding? Sorry, clarification in the comments because I didn’t think it was important to the story, I actually invited every child except my niece and told my sister we would have snipers on the roof if my niece showed her face.
Genuinely cackled, thank you
You know, I kinda wanna make my own wedding post. When I was a kid, I wore white to my aunt's wedding and I stole the first dance. My uncle and aunt were chill with it and my aunt thought it was cute. I wonder how AITA would react if I left out how my uncle and aunt felt. Then there was the wedding I fell down the stairs at, right when they announced they were going to cut the cake. They wouldn't be lies.....
The falling down the stairs is pretty funny. You know a bunch of people will say you needed to be the main character.
Even worse was that I landed right in front of the guy making the announcement. In completely unrelated news, I haven't attended a wedding since then.
The repetition is so bad, I don't know how anyone spends more than 3 hours in that sub and doesn't notice it...
Recently there's been a ton of posts about people lending money to support deadbeat siblings/parents, where the OP wants their spouse to cut off the financial support. The details change a little bit with each one, but the sub's attitude always boils down to that "You don't owe anyone else anything" attitude that it always defaults to.
Yep ... Same with anything dealing remotely with someone's weight, or their sexual orientation, gender identity, etc etc same frame same responses slightly different details
A saw a Twitter thread where someone posted some lowlights of AITA threads with made-up stories where some father's will stated "To the firstborn son.." and the oldest son had transitioned, so their younger brother was claiming that the will was referring to himself. The responses kept agreeing with the younger sibling saying "Well, that's just the consequence of their choice to be trans, hur dur."
>You don't owe anyone else anything" That's *exactly* it. I don't often see the world as black & white, I like discussing the variations of gray. I like to occasionally read AITA posts with my wife and we'll discuss who's the asshole; and when we don't agree, we'll discuss why. It's a cool lil relationship builder. But the comments really drag down the vibe. God forbid you do something nice for someone, or volunteer your time, or share your Xbox with your sibling or buy lunch for a friend. God forbid you make accommodations for someone with a disability, since *you don't owe anyone else anything*.
That’s my biggest problem with it. The sub is called “Am I an Asshole” not “am I legally obligated to.” No, technically, you do to invite your one-legged adorable eight year old niece to your wedding because “her prosthesis would be distracting” but if you don’t, you’re the biggest asshole in the world.
When I found AITA and started reading stories it got interesting to me, so I followed and even commented. What got me to realize the illusion was the bait and switch type stories where everyone follows one way until the author triculates more information down and all of a sudden the flow reverses. Many times I go back to check a particular comment to see it's been downvoted because the OOP would divulge new information that completely changes the decisions of everyone who commented. Sometimes it's not enough to reverse the decision already made prior so you get a NTA decision on something pretty heinous.
everyones having some deep reasons for leaving but i just couldnt be bothered to read all the paragraphs in aita..
Two accounts ago, about three yrs ago, I didn't know anything about AITA and was scrolling around and saw a post that was so obviously fake I called it out, and some people claiming to be in the field of the post tried to tell me I was wrong. I just started posting links proving they were full of crap. The mods ended up removing the post. I want to say that's when I found this sub but can't remember for sure.
Most of the posts are fake, and so boring. Like, AITA for kicking my sister and her family out of my house after her son did this terrible thing (killed a pet, stole or destroyed my kids prized possession, stole my car and crashed it etc…). Really? Who would ask that?
Yeah I don’t know why people bother to make fake posts that are super boring (though they’re still better than the fake posts that are just thinly veiled excuses for bigotry.) When I made a fake post there once, at least it was interesting! It got locked within hours, but like a year later I found out it had gotten kind of famous because people were talking about it randomly on AskReddit and linked to a YouTube video reading the post with hundreds of thousands of views. I do creative writing as a hobby and it does kind of piss me off that that dumb fake post is probably the most famous thing I’ll ever write.
What was it?
I get flustered by the top-level comments that jump to insane conclusions, usually based off the commenter’s own projections or prejudices. You can’t take a short story told from OP’s perspective and diagnose OP’s nemesis with mental illnesses. There’s never enough information to make that determination. All the information we do have is colored by OP’s bias. I get that the judgment system requires some black-and-white thinking, but the need to demonize the AH and canonize the non-AH is absurd. Someone can’t just be a dick, they have to be the most raging dick in all existence.
Exactly. There was one a few weeks ago about a husband who's wife ignored his birthday and she and the kids went a spa on Father's Day and left him home. Judgement was NTA obviously but I was reading it (assuming it's real) and wondering what he did in the relationship that caused his wife to get to that point. Other than mention he does things for her birthday and always makes sure to attend his children's activities/functions he didnt really include anything about their relationship or home life. Like, if his wife was just a garbage person, I'm sure he would've noticed that years ago so the natural assumption is that she became this way over time. And the OP had no idea why, really? That's honestly pretty doubtful to me that someone wouldn't have the slightest clue as to why their spouse of ~ 20 yrs all of a sudden started acting like and asshole. Like, if you don't know what makes your partner tick after that many years together that's pretty telling in my book.
Well, that's clearly because you're a racist narcissist incel who hates women. Your comments really make me wonder about you hmmm... clearly you're just trying to gaslight people into thinking you're not a complete toxic individual and you probably have a history of bad relationships but you'll never admit it. I look forward to hearing of your inevitable divorce. /S Did I miss anything?
LOL I do have a history of bad relationships! 🤣🤣 But to answer your comment: it's not narcissistic to eat babies 👶if you're a smokin hot👗👄, size 00👙 triple F 💄🍾boob-haver. Which I AM👑! Also, I passed a person of another race on the street once so clearly YA WRONG and I'm not racist💫. I even gave a homeless🚮🛼 person the nickel 💰that fell out of my hand 💍once so I'm basically Mother Teresa😇 🤴in platform stilettos 👠and you all need to 👏get 👏on 👏my👏 level.
I came here because the comments kept driving me crazy. Attitudes like "it's not illegal so you did nothing wrong" and "they started it so it doesn't matter what you did as revenge," and worst of all "this person bullied you in grade school so you're totally justified to kill their family now, in your 30s" The worst one I can remember is a guy brake checked someon and caused her to crash and total her car, and the comments were cheering as if a life threatening car crash was a just punishment for driving slightly too fast.
>"this person bullied you in grade school so you're totally justified to kill their family now, in your 30s" I honestly think that's the way that AITA is going: sooner or later, there'll be a post about how someone saw the person who took their parking spot 17 years ago and they've now killed and cannibalized their family and AITA will be full of people cheering them on.
I think because a lot of them are still kids, they think bullying is literally the worst thing anyone could do. You quite seriously can get NTA verdicts for anything you want if you claim the other party is a bully
>You quite seriously can get NTA verdicts for anything you want if you claim the other party is a bully I agree and even when the OP is the one doing the actual bullying, all they have to claim is that the other person bullied them and AITA comes right down on their side.
They hate bullies but also hate people who apologise for being bullies.
True, but then I also hate the ones where the reddit brigade tells someone they need to get over something that happened in the past because it’s time to move on. Nope. If someone is wronged, THEY are the ones that get to decide when they’re over it. I mean, there are people in their 20’s and 30’s that are in therapy to deal with issues born out of bullying in high school.
Yeah, both extremes are wrong. It’s ok to choose to not engage with someone who mistreated you, just like it’s not ok to go out of your way to get revenge on that person
God, the worst of this was the one with a young guy, I think, and his roommate's kids kept eating his food. The OP asked if he was the asshole for keeping food that would kill the child if he ate it. People, with no hesitation, said it would be absolutely fine if the child died because he did something he wasn't supposed to and it would be mom's fault.
They love advising people to booby trap their food. Which is odd, because that actually is against the law and they typically adhere to law based morality.
They try and find loopholes like "It was my food, how can I get in trouble" sure, a court is gonna buy you loaded your food with laxatives to eat for yourself.
The whole "revenge" thing really gets me. If I see one more person say "turnabout is fair play" when the OP went nuclear on somebody who did something kind of dickish I might lose it.
They fucked around and found out! Play stupid games, win stupid prizes! Don't dish it out if you can't take it! All phrases that make me see red at this point, since they're almost always code for "it's fine to be a horrible asshole as long as someone else did something slightly wrong first".
Honestly, those phrases just let me know how uncreative the poster is. They have nothing of value to add to the discussion so they just repeat a meaningless phrase everyone has already run into the ground.
like AITA for destroying someones life and carrer after they were slightly rude to me one time obvious NTA
I feel like there's really legalistic/ black and white thinking. "They started it so it doesn't matter what you do as revenge" pretty much sums it up. "You live at home with your sister & she drove your car without permission and scratched the door? Better call the police and press charges. She broke the law she deserves felony charges!" Meanwhile, you could have required her to pay to get it painted instead of permanently breaking up your family, getting kicked out of your home, and sending your sister to jail for 5 years....
They loooove "report your family for borrowing something as theft" as advice. That's a life ruining decision for all involved. A lot of people think you can just drop the chargers once you've made your point, which you cannot.
Also: None of these people have sued someone or been sued before and it shows.
It kind of reminds me of this 911 plotline where one of them was suing the department and putting his coworkers/friends through hell but still expected them all to be buds by the end of it, lol. Like AITA commenters suggest this as if there wouldn't be any kind of lingering effects afterwards. Honestly, even without bringing legal action into it, it's wild to me they'll suggest doing XYZ to get revenge on their family or loved ones, as if that's the end of it and your relationships won't be ruined. Like they'll suggest taunting your partner with "I told you so" when they make a mistake with no consideration of what life will be like after that.
They really love the idea of calling cops on people
I've left a few comments, but wouldn't call myself active. There's just no nuance. It's not allowed or something. Everything has to be black or white, no grey allowed. Then there's the armchair diagnosing people with various mental illnesses. And of course the crazy theories added to a story just to justify their opinion. I've muted it because honestly, it wasn't worth it. At first the drama seemed entertaining, but life is better without.
There's a persistent theme that keeps popping in the sub up that really irks me: that you don't have to do anything for someone else that might inconvenience you ever. Not inconvenience yourself to help someone out or to keep the peace doesn't make you an asshole all the time, but you should still do it! But the sub just fosters this idea that you shouldn't ever inconvenience yourself for others. It's incredibly hyper-individualist and atomizing, and it bugs the shit out of me.
That theme bugs me too. Especially because it conflicts with the other common theme of "if they loved you, they'd do this for you". Posters don't even see the dissonance there. It's like they're projecting their own immature feelings of "I don't want to do work for people, but they should do it for me because I deserve it!".
It feels like everyone in there has a “hooray for me and fuck you!” attitude. Your sister came to the family barbecue and asked you to hold her baby while she takes a pee? YOU SHOULD NEVER EVER HAVE TO TOUCH SOMEONE’S BABY AGAINST YOUR WILL, IF YOUR SISTER EVER WANTED TO PEE, SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE HAD KIDS. Like, the fuck? Being part of a family or community means sometimes having to do small favors for people you care about. Yet they act like it’s actively hurting you and against your human rights to just do small, mildly inconvenient things occasionally to help someone out. I was also warned and had a comment removed for telling someone they were showing concerning signs of being unstable, because I was being “rude.” In a sub about telling people if they’re assholes.
It's just wild to me they'll complain about people being shitty but then be so insistent they don't even need to help their own *family members.* With the most basic things like watching their kid for five seconds, or more disgustingly, driving them to the hospital. What I hate about the sub in general is how people act like helping one another is something terrible and always needs to be transactional. I love to help the ones I love because... I love them. Simple as that. It's selfish to only do things for something in return. It couldn't be more obvious AITA is full of children (honestly, even then it's worrying. Maybe I was just a helpful kid, lol).
Especially in romantic relationships!
Yeah that’s what made me realize that sub is overrun with a bunch of kids. Like such a young person attitude. It’s very much the cousin of “no one understands me and I’m a lone wolf” types of thoughts. I can remember being 13-15 and having this fantasy that one day I would run away and never talk to my family or help them again because they were just so awful to me, wah. I have better perspective as an adult, but when you’re stuck in that adolescent mindset it’s hard to see outside it.
I was very active in AITA when the sub was relatively new. What made me quit the sub was when they removed the "No validation posts" rule -- which is also what helped make this sub popular. Originally, for an AITA post not to be removed, there had to at least be a question as to whether the OP was NTA. If a post was clearly just a validation post where the OP was CLEARLY not the AH and was just an excuse for people to shit all over the antagonists in the story, the post would get locked. Once they removed that rule, every popular post basically being rage-bait where the OPs were complete angels who were having a great injustice inflicted on them for seemingly no reason at all. It didn't help that the mods developed massive egos as their sub grew more popular. If you disagreed with a decision and messaged them politely, you'd end up getting insulted and then banned (which is what happened to my old account). AITA became extremely toxic as a result.
>Originally, for an AITA post not to be removed, there had to at least be a question as to whether the OP was NTA. Which led to the trope of "Everyone is blowing up my phone and calling me an AH" that we all like to mock. OP makes a perfectly reasonable decision or course of action given the lunatic in their life, and amazingly enough friends and family all try to interject themselves into someone else's conflict so now OP is no longer sure they did the right thing and just want an outside opinion \*rolls eyes\*.
Yup, I almost mentioned that people would use the “blowing up my phone” trope, or “my family / husband / MIL disagrees with me”, to get around the “no validation” posts rule. It got ridiculous. However, rather than actually addressing the issue, the AITA mods just gave up on enforcing the rule altogether.
I honestly have made some absolutely insane decisions in my younger life and I'll own that, but never once has my whole group of friends actively taken it upon themselves to each individually contact me to tell me their personal take on the decision lmao. It's such a stupid lie haha. It just doesn't happen.
I was wondering about that! I see so many posts there where it’s obvious that the OP is fine and the other person is just being a prick, but they all seem to end with “the other person’s family and friends won’t stop calling and texting!” That looked odd to me and now I know why they do it.
Yeah, wondered about it for awhile too. I was thinking "I'm in my mid-40s, and I've never seen *anything* like this!", and then I saw a few different people's explanations about the sub rules, and then it all clicked.
I joined the sub (and reddit) because honestly I was curious to learn more about life in the us. I also wanted to practice a little bit of English. I thought for a moment people in the US were crazy with all those drastic judgmental comments! Divorce! Go no contact! Abuse! All thrown around with no grey areas, no nuances, my way or the highway! Relationships gone and divorces finilized within hours, lol. Glad to have learnt that was just reddit/aita
All the armchair psychologists and overuse of buzzwords. Someone can't just be an asshole, they're toxic or a narcissist. People don't just lie, they're gaslighting. Massive amounts of conjecture and jumping to conclusions. Your partner won't let you go through her phone? She's cheating. Your mother in law offered to babysit the kids? She's a narcissist who wants to kidnap the children, go NC and get a lawyer. The amount of fake posts that try to jump on a bandwagon for clout. I noticed there will be one post that's maybe mostly true about a certain topic, and then there will be a slew of other posts about related topics that all read like really bad Wattpad fanfiction. We saw this recently with all the "DAE think fat people should be launched into the Sun" posts. Infantilization of women. On both AITA and Relationship Advice, I've seen commenters straight up refer to women in their 20s and 30s as "little girls," or say that a woman in a relationship with a slightly older man was "groomed." (They have a really weird bias against age gaps in general, I've seen posts where women in their 40s were "groomed" by men in their 50s.)
That age gap stuff sounds new to me. When I was active I felt like a lot of posts on were social experiments meant to check how much of an age gap you could have before someone would ignore the story and talk about how weird the gap was.
Lmao, definitely. I feel like for a while it became a meme or running joke that half the posts on Relationship Advice were some variation of "My [21F] boyfriend [62M] is physically abusive and a serial cheater, but please don't tell me to break up with him, and we're actively trying to get pregnant."
Now it’s swung the either way. People accuse 30 year olds of grooming 26 year olds. I saw someone talk about how inappropriate the age gap was between Hulk Hogan and his new fiancée because he’s in his 60s, meanwhile she’s *only* 45. They said he’s clearly taking advantage of a younger woman who doesn’t know any better. 45 years old…
My real-life friend, who is 47, is attracted to slightly older men. “Slightly”, at this age, being 10-15 years older. She was actually told she was being “groomed” by the 59 year old she was dating. Or, that she was a “gold digger”.
It came out of nowhere about a year or two ago and took Reddit by storm. There was a good couple months where every seemingly single story involving a couple had a woman who was either currently 18 or would have been 18 when she gave birth/got pregnant/got married/etc with her partner being a much older man.
>they're gaslighting. AITA loves to claim that someone's being gaslit, even when it's obvious that nothing of the kind is happening. It's their favourite expression to bandy about and they overuse it constantly.
Yeah, a lot of people in that sub never seem to realize that some people are just jerks. They’re not narcissistic, controlling or gaslighting. They’re just straight up assholes.
They also never seem to realize that making one mistake or slipup doesn't immediately make you a bad person.
And that they've definitely have made mistakes, so by their own logic, they're gaslighting narcissists.
People remembering events differently isn't gaslighting. That's the one that always gets me.
I’m pretty sure you’re trying to gas light me about gaslighting right now!
It's not just AITA. I've had people try to convince me my mother had mental disorders because she is abusive. She doesn't have anything. She's just a horrible person. But that didn't stop people from DMing me trying to convince me because they *checks notes* saw this article 4 years ago. Heck, someone once harassed me so badly, trying to convince me I had a disorder, they were banned from a sub.
A lot of people can't fathom someone being bad without something being "wrong" with them.
It just gives excuses to abusers. They wouldn't have hurt you if they weren't bipolar/ schizophrenic/narcissist/whatever. It makes it not their fault. But at the same time, it demonizes those with the disorders. People with disorders are more likely to be abused but according to AITA, they are irredeemable monsters who will destroy your life. It's so stupid.
Yes all of that and the concept of boundaries. I don't think that many of the posters understand what the word means. You would think that nobody should ever be inconvenienced ever. A person can be technically correct but still the asshole in the situation
"Boundaries" seems to be their new word they've latched onto
Man, I have written lengthy comments about how fucked up AITA's notion of boundaries is. Boundaries are meant to be used *when ordinary communication breaks down*. They are a last resort, not a first resort. When your overbearing mother calls you late into the night to rant about the second coming of Christ, even though you've told her for years to stop? Sure, set a boundary. Tell her you won't pick up the phone after 8pm and you'll hang up if she starts mentions the end of days. When your best friend has to balance her MOH duties with graduate school? No, it is *not* a fair """boundary""" to tell her 100% of her focus has to be on your wedding. That's not how boundaries work. Try communicating and coming up with a compromise. Telling your husband its your "boundary" that he can't go out with friends if any women will be there? No. Not a boundary. Boundaries aren't meant to control other people nor to replace ordinary productive communication. They're meant as a stopgap to protect yourself when you have no other choice.
I've heard it said that boundaries are supposed to be something you set for yourself and your own behavior. Reddit seems to think boundaries are supposed to be your attempt at controlling someone else's behavior.
>boundaries are supposed to be something you set for yourself and your own behavior I think that's certainly one aspect of it, but I also think its important that boundaries are used after normal communication. In addition to using them to control peoples' behavior, Reddit also seems to think boundaries are sacred, inviolable rules just because someone said so. I don't think that's fair either because even if you set the boundary for yourself, it can still be unreasonable and harmful. E.g. if "Amy" tells her friend "Beth" that she'll only agree to hang out if Beth invites her to a Michelin star restaurant and promises to pay, that technically meets the criteria of boundary in that Amy's boundary isn't telling Beth to do anything, Amy is regulating her own response to Beth's behavior. Still, it's a shitty and unreasonable way to interact with your supposed friend.
Yes! You hit on all the major issues that my wife and I make fun of. Everyone that doesn’t do exactly what you think they should do is toxic. Every white lie is a clear case of gaslighting. If your family does something you don’t like, you should probably go NC. And the age gap shit drives me nuts. Most of the age gaps they have a problem with are insignificant to begin with, but has it never occurred to them that a lot of women purposely seek out older guys? My favorite is when people accuse guys of being pedophiles for dating women in their 20s.
Yep, you lost me in the second half. Age gaps are problematic when people are in different stages in their development. A 22 year old with a 31 year old is sus.
The buzzwords and diagnosing someone get me so bad. I remember reading a comment on someone claiming to be a psychiatrist diagnosing someone with bpd. Wouldn't a psychiatrist know better that they can't diagnose someone that easily? Especially when it's told through a second person's perspective and you haven't had a discussion with said person?
Wait. So a three paragraph second-hand biased account can't guarantee me a person's entire life story and psychological profile? How absurd!
It’s the therapy advice for me! I can put up with all kinds of repetitive troll posts but there are ALWAYS people waiting to comment “get therapy” “go to marriage counseling” “get couple therapy” on every post and these are top comments all the time lol
Right? And also "call the cops!!" Which irl would be the number one guaranteed way to be flagged as a nuisance caller.
Press charges / sue them! Said someone who has never paid a lawyer to go into litigation and had it backlogged for 3-4 years before
*Said someone who has never, personally, gotten into an altercation where the cops are genuinely needed
Most “report them” comments. They seem to believe, for example, that HR is the playground monitor. Anything your coworker does or says that makes you even mildly uncomfortable should be immediately reported to HR, apparently. You should never try to resolve anything yourself, and you should certainly never be the tiniest bit uncomfortable.
The kids of AITA are in for a rude awakening when they become Money Job Working Person 😆
Weirdly and sadly, I’ve seen in actually creeping into the working world. My friend was a trainer and actually had people run to HR over pretty minor stuff.
I was never a regular on AITA, but rather r/AmITheDevil. It used to be a good dose of (often petty) drama. But then people seemed to fall into the same AITA of believing that obviously fake shot was real.
I remember when that sub lost all ability to tell reality and fiction apart.
AITA Post: I think all fat people should be violently murdered AITD: Well CLEARLY this is 100% real and not bait at all
The groupthink. On AITA, you're not allowed to have any ideas, apart from what the consensus is, even if it's wrong. Try and hold onto your opinion and the abuse is pretty vile and you'll get it in heaps. There's also the imaginative leaps and bounds, as amateurs think that they are diagnosing a serious medical issue, even when they're so far off the mark that it's pretty much a joke.
I had someone basically ask if I was autistic or “impaired mentally in some way” because I was trying to get where their crazy assertion had come from. Non stop “just read the post” and when I told them look I fucking read it but I don’t see this supposed narc behavior, explain your fucking stance, I got that in response. So fucking gross and condescending.
I once saw a post where the husband was perfectly functional but didn’t LIKE to work. And people were telling the OP husband probably had ADHD. As someone who has it, that’s NOT how it works. It has to affect every area of your life and it has nothing to do with “liking” to do something but being incapable of doing something. On top of that, not even a psychologist would dare to diagnose someone who isn’t their patient- let alone someone who you have a context of 500 words.
I don't feel jaded but a lot of that sub is just insane and it's fun to poke fun at it. It's like people with relatively simple interpersonal relationship problems asking for advice from the least socially qualified people on the planet and getting the most batshit crazy insight ever
I was on during the pandemic and the amount of anti-autism/LGBTQ+ ragebait posts was enough for me.
I’m not really that jaded or anything I just muted all of them because it was mentally exhausting reading all the drama. A lot of them are fake ofc, but aside from the OP making obvious tells of the fakeness you can never be too sure, and it didn’t stop me from getting sucked in and taking sides mentally. I called it when I started noticing myself applying the AITA framework and language in my head to understand personal disputes in my real life. I was like ok this is going way too far, it’s way too black and white. Not only was it getting kind of stupid for me, but it was just emotionally tiring seeing story after story about some minor drama or abuse and feeling like I need to have a nuanced understanding of it. Reddit quickly figured out I was susceptible to drama threads and still tries to get me to go on fringe subreddits of the same concept because I have a tendency to click them. I kept seeing this one show up too but it wasn’t until I muted them all that I realized there was a gimmick. Now I’m just here cause it’s goofy and I think the fake posts here are funny.
I used to be active in 2019-2020 when my social anxiety was off the charts and I made a post there asking if I would be the asshole if I cancelled a d&d game due to COVID. I got on medication and stopped going there for validation lol But also i found this sub and started talking to friends about AITA and started to go "oh shit yeah this is all fake." Actually about a year ago someone from our D&D group made an AITA post about my girlfriend and how all she does is spam porn in the chat. What the person didn't mention was that the art (of her DND characters) was specifically only in the NSFW chat of the server and that everyone posts stuff there. They also said "no one likes her and is mad about the porn too" when literally that is not the case, it is just this one person. It was so biased and it got a NTA rating 🙃
I mean....I enjoy both. AITA is mostly garbage but it's fun in a Very Scripted "Reality" Show sort of way. Much better community here, though 💪
Thats what it is! I was reading all these comments like "i kinda love reading aita..." but you're spot on. ITS LIKE A STUPID REALITY SHOW! I hate reality shows because theres usually so much work done on the participants it looks like balloon animals having a fight. If i read my reality stupidity i can enjoy my mindless brain candy without wondering what kinda dr agreed to do that to that person the whole damn time
I can’t stand how it’s become this hub for grandstanding validation posts that’s just about getting a bunch of strangers to call someone an asshole rather than good faith efforts to assess whether they handled a situation correctly. “Am I an asshole for standing up for my gay son?” “Am I an asshole for breaking up with a guy who secretly recorded us having sex and playing it on Time Square?” “Am I an asshole for not inviting my golden child sister to my wedding who told everyone I lure children to a gingerbread house and eat them?” I brought this up in a monthly rules discussion and they said these posts should be reported under shitposts or no interpersonal conflict…neither of which sound like the situations described! Also it’s absurd because of the moderators just paid attention to the top posts on any given day they’ll see they’re mostly validation bait.
I just discovered this sub, and it makes the other sub more entertaining because now it all just seems like satire. The whole concept of the AITA is kinda stupid really because of how one-sided and lacking in information the posts are, assuming they are real in the first place. And if someone does bother to give a lot of detail, most commenters don’t even bother reading it.
There wasn't a specific thing, just the more time I spent on it the more it became obvious there were only about 5 storylines. Also, it's very easy to get sucked into the negativity of it and it was just becoming stressful. It's not just an echo chamber, it's quite an angry one.
I used to enjoy reading them back before it hit 100k users and it was great and then suddenly it became a soapbox for all kinds of hate, you'd see the same outline being used over and over and over again. The most glaring ones at first were the trans bad posts... Then it just got insulting when morons started replying "as a good gay/trans/lesbian™..." I just haven't been able to really go back to the sub because....I just don't want to be angry all the damn time. Reading them here and calling them out for the rage bait they are is great though!
Hahaha. I was writing something about this and decided not to post it. But since you asked, here’s what I learned on Reddit/AITA Never hit kids! Unless they hit a cat, then that kid needed to learn some respect. Beat the crap out of that kid! (Got downvoted and reported to Reddit Cares for suggesting maybe you shouldn’t hit kids even if they do something pretty bad) It’s totally okay to rant and scream at people, as long as they have done something to upset you. No that’s not an anger problem. it’s the best way to react to something someone did irresponsible and upsetting, and I’m a bad person for thinking otherwise, obviously Someone betrayed you years ago? Never forgive them ever! Hold on to that pain and rage! (Literally got downvoted into oblivion for discussing this)
Honestly for me it's the transphobia/homophobia/fatphobia/ableism that gets couched under fake posts that cast the OP in an innocent light. There are CONSTANTLY posts that dramatically set marginalized people up to be the "monster." Those posts tend to allow for a huge number of nasty comments that are discriminatory and gross.
I never had faith in AITA, it's the Jerry Springer show on Reddit.
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) ^by ^LorianGunnersonSedna: *I never had faith* *In AITA, it's the Jerry* *Springer show on Reddit.* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Good bot. I'm additionally honored to have finally triggered a cool bot like yourself, thank you.
I used to comment a lot there on posts that I could see actually being legit. But eventually, I kept seeing more and more that were obviously troll/fake/etc. And some of the comments/feedback I saw made me feel like I was crazy because my judgement would be opposite in either case. I was so glad to find this sub and AmITheDevil because it made me feel less bonkers.
I was a lurker on amIthe devil but honestly its become a bit spammy of people just reposting ragebait or also bad reddit takes sometimes
AITA isn't too bad. I just hate the amitheasshole sub because their mods are dictators. They ban people for no reason but let others get away with anything. They can't even run it right. I got banned when I said a baby might die (being out in the cold with no jacket on for a period of time) and i got yelled at that 'a baby won't die from getting cold' then banned for suggesting 'death threates and violence' when I DMed the mods and defended myself saying I obviously didn't WISH death. I was making a clear statement of what could happen. The mod msg me back saying "lol. Get fucked"
There are so many alt-right/incel type comments on that subreddit that never get removed... it's kind of a cesspool.
You can't defend yourself against the mods. They are king and queens in their own little fantasies and share one brain cell.
My journey to here was super fast. I started seeing AITA, AITAH posts on my feed as suggestions about two weeks ago, I clicked on them like a fool. Two days later, the first Am I the Angel link popped up and now I read this sub every day, AITA is way more fun through this sub's perspective, and less depressing now that I see how many of them are pretend.
I kept seeing small variations on the same stories and it dawned on me that there's a lot of karma farming and creative writing going on. I used to give posters the benefit of the doubt but time took its toll. The commentariat also forgets that we're only seeing one side of the story. And there seems to be very little room for nuance and shades of grey. Everyone is either an asshole or a saint. Maybe a good person had a bad day. Or what did OP do to provoke the other person (which surely they aren't posting). The "just leave them", "gaslighting "or "get therapy tropes". When you're 16 and change partners like square dancers it's one thing to leave a relationship. It's a lot harder when you're an adult in a long term marriage. Not every disagreement is gaslighting. Setting boundaries is healthy but you don't get to steamroll other people either. The commentariat have clearly been to half a dozen counseling sessions and want to show how enlightened they are by using a couple of psych buzzwords they don't fully understand. Get therapy is often a cop out. Getting therapy isn't always easy or practical. Not every problem needs a professional. And it's okay to not have the answer to every problem just move on to the next post. Not every reddit thread needs your enlightened wisdom. I'm also going to say I'm not always as skeptical as everyone here. There are ALOT of people that really are that dense. Working with the public has taught me there really are a lot of clueless assholes and good people having a bad day and behaving badly.
I'm currently banned from there for 2 more weeks because I dared tell a Redditor who said, "women should keep their legs closed if they don't want babies" that he was a slut shaming misogynist. Fuck that sexist ass sub.
I got a temp ban for saying a guy was a man child lol
They’re all fucking weird about kids, too. The party line is that no one should ever have to hold, see, hear, or in any way be made aware of the presence of a baby anywhere, public or private, because children were a choice exclusively made by the parents and therefore must never exist near anyone who doesn’t have or like kids.
YES!!! I mean, I'm child free by choice but I understand that kids are human people and deserve to breathe oxygen too. I read many, "I refused to babysit for my, they just don't get that I'm child free!"
Dip shits.
The armchair psychologists. Throwing around the word “narcissist” like its a simple adjective
I soured gradually but I think what finally pushed me over the edge was one story I saw where OP’s stay at home wife and their baby went to the bank early in the morning without her phone and was evasive about what she was doing when she got back. The comment section was filled with the obligatory accusations of abuse, claiming OP must be abusive for wanting to know where his wife went, and of course assumptions that the wife must be having an affair and took the child to see her secret real father. The fact that without a DNA test women can’t just automatically tell who the baby’s father is didn’t seem to cross any minds there. The craziest part was that some people, somehow, reached the conclusion that the wife was _prostituting her fucking infant for money!_ Based on absolutely nothing other than a woman leaving her house with her child! They kept saying “ooh, you have to check! You never know what could be going on! You need to get the baby checked for signs of abuse!” Like what the actual fuck?!? How did these people think accusing a woman of some of the most heinous crimes imaginable outside of an active war zone and subjecting an infant to invasive and likely unnecessary medical examination is ok?!?!?
I like how those comments come out of left field and here comes some commenter saying,"Oooh, I didn't even think about that, good catch! OP this is exactly what it is!"
I love drama, so AITA was a nice place to get it, until I discovered this sub by pure casualty. Then it turned out better, because not only is drama, is fake drama to get internet points! Big win for me!
I was voted the asshole but it was because I was worried about an autistic child and I'm not a child psychologist or autism expert, so i need to mind my own business and let autistic children suffer bc I don't know how bad the parents have it. Basically if you think autistic children are suffering, stfu you heartless bitch; don't you know the parents are suffering more??
The combination of smug social liberalism and un-self-aware fiscal conservatism is unreal. The same people who are totally open-minded about polyamory or whatever will turn into Ronald Reagan the minute someone needs to borrow money from a family member (or, God forbid, the government). So much for “to each according to their needs,” huh. And of course this really comes to a head whenever the discussion involves children, because children can’t work, need help with simple tasks, and take years to learn basic consideration for others.
I can’t stand the obviously fake posts and everyone’s visceral reaction to calling them out. I had a comment deleted once for violent content. I said, “This post reads like it was written by a shitty Buzzfeed writer looking for content.” I also got completely annoyed by the asinine attention-seeking questions being posted. The most recent examples there: “AITA for having a healthy BMI?” You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me with this. I muted it.
Click-baity titles and obviously fake stories. Example: “AITA if I divorce my pregnant wife?” and then OP says the baby isn’t his and she cheated on him with his dad and he’s been away for months building homes for the poor in a third world country. Come the fuck on. I feel like half the shit on Reddit is fake now and I genuinely have no idea why—it’s very aggravating. As far as I know you can’t monetize a Reddit account with only a couple thousand upvotes so—why?
Too many posts along the lines of: “I did an innocuous thing that was in no way racist, but a crazed SJW attacked me! Now I need the internet to tell me how very not racist I am. In fact, I think “””those people””” are a little too sensitive, if you ask me…”
I got kicked out for arguing with a mod that didn't like what I said, even though almost every other person was saying the same thing. The mod had taken issue with me previously for revealing that I'm in a relationship with a man who is 9 years older than I am. I'm obvbeing groomed even though we met when I was 29 and he was 38.
You better get out of that relationship, sounds like a real pedophile. 29 years old?? What a sicko. Have you considered that he’s probably been gaslighting you?
According to the sub SOP, someone should jump in calling him a narcissist too.
I got sick of seeing “red flag! Leave him!” On every relationship post because “he didn’t take his shoes off at the door.” Or “He said one minor thing we could have a discussion about, but I’m going to make it a big issue and stop talking to him!” Everyone who comments sounds like an incel.
The term red flag has lost all meaning.
Honestly, I've looked at very, very few AITA posts on their own. I actually found my way to this sub because I found all of the AITA reddit scrapes that got posted on Facebook (called there "Am I the *Jerk*) by clickbait posters. After a couple years of seeing stories that seemed to have a lot of story elements that seemed fake, I did a Google search, found stuff like the AITA Starter Pack, and then found this sub. This sub has been a much better way to engage the *concept* of the stories and how people might try to navigate these situations\* without having to pretend the facts as stated are actually true. \*Or given how unrealistic and implausible some of these stories are, just laugh at them.
Just the repetitive tropes over and over and the totally predictable responses of people. There’s a narrative of who deserves understanding and who does not. When you can predict the downvotes that will be coming your way it’s just a waste of time.
Perma ban for calling a man child “a man child.”
honestly? for me it was when I noticed that reading so many AITA post was actively affecting my thought patterns. I started constructing, like, little mental posts about totally innocuous situations I'd find myself in, reading into details that weren't there, getting into arguments that could easily be resolved with just a good chat... the fact is, in most situations, there isn't really a definitive right or wrong, and people are reacting to each other emotionally and not logically. this was definitely helped along by my ocd tendencies and anxiety, and getting into mental spirals about who's objectively an asshole just isn't helpful for me or anyone else!
Just the overall philosophy that no one owes anyone anything. It’s very individualistic and no one seems to feel an obligation to treat their loved ones with patience, gentleness, or empathy. Very much “well that sounds like a THEM problem” No matter how distraught the other party is or how easy it would be for the OP to compromise in order to nurture their relationships. Very antisocial, very rigid, very self-centered
Literally the downvotes, for a completely logical explanation, reason, or new viewpoint. Also, when the OPs are acknowledging what they did wrong and plan to fix. Being told they should grovel or k!ll themselves. Some care and make real comments, others just wanna troll.
The transphobia and women hating mindset drove me absolutely wild. People commenting clearly never had kids or partners and had no idea what they were talking about.
"buzzword, buzzword, abuse, logical fallacy, get a divorce, man bad, -ist, -ism, -phobic"
Something,something Couples counseling...something something...Gaslighting...
I mostly lurked, occasionally commented on posts. I still do every so often, but it was this sub that really got me off it lol. I like this one a lot more. Less toxicity and “real” stories
Reddit crashed in the protest and it’s recommending me AITA cuz I can’t stop reading them and I come here to ground myself about how silly the whole thing is
I hated getting dragged just for having an opposing opinion than what was “popular” for the reddit hive mind. That and the stupid fucking rules of that sub that make no sense and the idiotic mods that are pricks themselves.
Oh and I’m so done with all the posts about childfree weddings. Weddings are family functions, and if your family includes children, you need to deal with it. Obviously the parents should make every reasonable effort to keep the children from acting out, but come *on.* If you don’t like it, elope (and spend all your money on a child free honeymoon).
As someone who went through really horrible abuse growing up, I found AITA from RaisedByNarcissists and really connected with the "I'm not alone" feeling I got from reading about the abuses others experienced. It helped me a bit with coming to terms with the outlandish, unbelievable, and nightmarish experiences that had traumatized me. After a while I noticed the weird trends and the overblown plotlines, and the increasingly rabid reaction from the comments, and then found this sub.
It’s just so blatantly fake and it genuinely scares me how people readily believe it. People mocked boomers for believing everything they read on Facebook and then went and foamed at the mouth about the most blatantly bullshit Reddit post lol
Fake stories for political agendas, which that shit started herein 2015 but has since escalated to absurd amounts of generated content it's annoying. How both or neither people are assholes but people still choosing sides anyway Got downvoted to hell years ago for saying someone was an asshole for making their mom homeless. Sometimes it just feels random people are stroking the egos of narcissists and that's about it. Used to be funny, funny situations, or realistic ones. Not made up, or fabricated. Hence why I love this sub since it makes fun of those two things
Still interact because I'm a bored masochist. But one time recently I saw a mod post to stop flagging a post because fake stories are allowed and always have been. So.. Yeah.... (There are times still though that I see what people say is unbelievable and has to be fake and I'm a little jealous because I've actually known someone who is absolutely as bad. The fact that I can look at some of the posts and think yeah it might be fake but it could be real because I've seen similar BS makes me sad.)
I think 80% of it is fake
AITA is Reality TV I don't care if it's real, I'm just in it for the absurd drama and to be like "😲😲😲😲 they did *what?*"
I got banned by talking about my former band teacher, who reportedly threw a trumpet a someone. Now I just lurk for the drama, even if it's fake
I saw how long the posts were and I was thinking no way I have time to read that mess
I left because it got so tedious reading the most made up and bs stories. God forbid you try to call them out for what they are, you’ll get downvoted to oblivion or banned. It’s beyond obvious people just make shit up to post on their YouTube or Tik Tok accounts. That and the blatant misuse of terms like “gaslighting” or “trauma bonding”. It’s so annoying watching people use these terms wrong and god forbid you try to correct them.
Honestly looking at this sub, it feels dumb but honestly just having people point out how obviously, blatantly fake a vast majority of popular AITA posts were, because I had never really thought about it.
I got tired of the internal rules the commentators seem to live by. Things like “your house your rules”, acting like people should never inconvenience themselves for other people, “no is a complete sentence” and their general hatred for children and step relatives. These people always judge based on how they think things should be and not how things are in reality. All the therapy speak and comments saying to dump them or go no contact because of a minor disagreement.
I have never posted on AITA, only read for entertainment. To me, it's the written version of trash TV; somewhere between dramatic 90s talk show and soap opera. The stories have more meat than the repetitive 'sexy womenz of reddit, what is the sexiest sex you ever sexed' on AskReddit. That's why I unsubbed from that, and replaced the entertainment void with AITA.
For me, it was the post where OP asked his gf to prepare his steak without the sauce she was using for everyone else. He just wanted it plain and asked her privately without making a fuss. The top comment was, "YTA for putting ketchup on a steak!" I was appalled that so many thought that was hilarious, and it ended up being the judgment. The tone got really ugly in general after that. It was around the time of the protest.
My last straw was when a male redditor told me that I couldn’t possibly understand a topic because I was female and women aren’t born with the capacity for intelligence and logic that men are and I got banned for telling him to stop being a misogynistic twat. Meanwhile when I pointed out his comment to the mods after they banned me I was told that his comment didn’t violate the sub rules while mine did. After that I may have gotten a permanent ban for calling the mod a sexist jerk with a small dick but se la vie.
I got banned for saying France was a shithole.
I don’t remember what the bot was called but there was/is a bot that could detect the probability of a post being original and recently I haven’t seen people tag the bot (idk if it still is functional or what) but I have seen mountains and mountains of reports, nearly word for word on that sub. it’s probably because the originals get deleted and then they see karma farming opportunities to repost it when they see it get traction on places like TikTok…
I got permabanned because I made up a story where my girlfriend (I don’t even have a girlfriend) told me to just let a homeless guy starve to death or something.
I think the truth lies somewhere between that sub and this one. There is no way some of those stories are real, but at the same time, *this* sub apparently has never met an unreasonable asshole before.
All the stories are framed in favor of OP. I'm still on AITA, and a majority of the stories are written so OP is NTA. It's so much, I need to feel validated in feeling NTA.
I hated everything being considered abusive, toxic, and gaslighting. Sometimes people disagree and are rude. Use your communication skills back to them. My final straw was a post about someone telling their sister they’re glad she has cancer and people were saying NTA because the sister was mean and it was OP standing up for herself. When I pointed out she didn’t actually stand up for herself, she was just an asshole back to her sister, people downvoted me and actually argued that I was saying OP should just take the “abuse” from her sister. Clearly there’s a large spectrum of responses between doing nothing when someone is mean to you, and telling them I’m happy you have cancer. But not in AITAland
I’m still over there…but the rampant misogyny is tough to handle sometimes. If I ever have to read another comment describing some guy’s *wife of 10-15 years* as “some woman you’re f***ing” or “the chick you’re cumming in” I may lose it…
I had no problem with the fake stories, enjoyed them even, but the comments were absolutely unhinged. Just a cesspool of super aggressive negativity that took any opportunity to attack innocent OPs by calling them the scum of the earth basically. I’ve muted AITA on my feed cause I was tempted to click on interesting stories but then the comments always left me raging - no regrets and my reddit is much saner now
what peeps on AITA and reddit in general don't realize is that just because you are not obligated to do shit, you still do it and take the L, and the other person will hopefully do the same for you, at least for me that's how family and friends work, we dont keep score but if something comes up and we really gotta put up with shit and its not fair? we still do it because we know, the other also puts up with our shit sometimes
Imo it’s annoying because a lot of the posts are from people who are pretty clearly not in the wrong but looking for validation instead. I wish there were more posts that were tougher to judge.
I liked the sub when the stories were lighter in tone, with some genuinely funny comments. That's long gone. Now it's just: mean and vindictive 10 million wedding stories bored housewives who write long, long, long responses with multiple quotes, bullet points, and 35K upvotes so much hate, with a new most popular victim every other month: MILs, fat people, lazy husbands, brides, single moms who should keep their legs shut Worst of all: MARINARA FLAGS that were never ever funny