What's the most cringy shit you've seen on reddit?
i'll start. i saw a ask reddit post saying something along the lines of "men of reddit whats something women can't understand" and the comments were just. oh my god. the main one that made me want to puke was
"when dudes walk by each other and nod" and the whole fucking thread was just fedoras with arms soypogging like it was some secret language or something. "when you nod upwards, it means respect!!!!!1!!11 when you nod downwards its aggression!!!1!11!!!!!" as if women dont do the same shit.
Then there was the time the admins took down /r/FatPeopleHate, one of those subs with candid pictures of people, and the fedoras collectively fucked up the whole website with their rage, for days and days. Honestly, I've never even seen such a level of collective activism, of course it would be for the worst thing possible.
That one and some others were deleted by order of then-CEO Ellen Pao, it was like throwing a lit match into a powderkeg. The things r*ddit holds most dearly - misogyny, racism, and xenophobia - erupted from its sizeable population of reactionary neckbeards into a shitstorm of fist-pounding tantrums like nothing the site had seen to that point. The insults and threats of violent fantasies were endless and many were Sinophobic in nature. A few years after it happened I remember a discussion (maybe on /r/ShitRedditSays or similar) around how the bigots who inhabited /r/FatPeopleHate et. al., were heavily overlapped with same crowd who would later be found in The_Donald and related right-wing hate subs.
NATOpedia has an article for her and there's some detail on this incident if you want more slop on it (I didn't read every word of the article, just skimmed, so can't say whether it's tainted/biased by one of the neckbeard power editors).
The reaction to the removal of an obvious hate sub was what made me re-evaluate my outlook on life. I remember everyone going "we weren't ACTUALLY hating fat people. We were saving their lives by bullying them thin"
and I thought "wait, but I thought we did hate fat people That's all that was ever posted, I thought we all just agreed that it was fun and good to hate them. Why are you lying?"
Then seeing all the responses rightly pointing out how fucked up an outlook you'd need to have to hate people for being fat made me reconsider not being a dumb asshole.