The sprawling ecosystem of Reddit’s Am I the Asshole

It’s the stories that draw people in: A bride feeling upstaged on her wedding day; the woman whose husband insists on bringing his sister with them on their honeymoon; an airline passenger who wonders if she should have given up her first-class seat for a stranger’s child. These are all tales of questionable behavior from r/AmItheAsshole. AITA, as it’s known for short, is hosted by Reddit, the one-stop clearinghouse for internet drama, comeuppances, and popcorn gallery judgments on the behavior of strangers. The mothership has been on a hot streak, tripling its traffic over the last year, when Google tweaked its search algorithm to prioritize content made by and for real people. Since then, Reddit has risen to over 340 million weekly unique users. Starting from around that same period, AITA has ascended rapidly from niche forum to mainstream forum to omnipresent cultural juggernaut. The AmITheAsshole subreddit, as Reddit’s topic-based forums are known, boasts 20 million members ready to decide who’s right in a given situation and who’s wrong, if a hair more evocatively. It’s seen numerous spin-offs; not just advice subreddits and confessional subreddits that get at the same yen for revelation and judgment, but subreddits devoted to filtering and curating all those other advice and confessional subs, so that readers can find only the best (or worst) stories. But AmITheAsshole’s cultural dominance doesn’t end there. This Reddit sprawl has spilled over outside of the platform itself, spawning a whole internet ecosystem dedicated to reading and sharing content from advice subreddits. TikTok is full of automated accounts that read stories from AITA in monotone against weirdly hypnotic footage of games. Twitter and Instagram are replete with screenshots of Reddit stories, while dozens of audio podcasters and YouTubers have sprung up to retell and comment on the latest scandalous post. The ecosystem has spawned merch of all types, from coffee mugs to children’s book parodies to self-help journals. The memes practically make themselves at this point. How did we get here? What is it about these endlessly tawdry tales that have us so addicted? Advice subreddits are nothing new. AITA was first created in 2013, the same year as the site’s first breakout advice forum, r/Relationships. In the years that immediately followed, that sub and its various spin-offs dominated the site. Their purpose was simple enough: ask other Redditors for advice about your relationships and other conflicts, be they tiny or epic. And Redditors responded en masse: Since it was created r/Relationships grew to over 3.5 million subscribers. AITA built on that promise, by streamlining the comment section debates from those other subs into a simple, clean voting system: YTA (you’re the asshole), NTA (not the asshole), and ESH (everyone sucks here). (There’s another designation, NAH for “no assholes here,” but that one gets less use. The internet demands villains!) This structure cut down on lots of needless debate and got to the point: Were you the asshole or not? As a cultural phenomenon, AITA’s impact has been wide-ranging: It’s been the subject of philosophical and demographic study; it’s been credited with helping people leave their own toxic and unhealthy relationships. The dynamics of the forum itself have spawned their own obsessive scrutiny. To an extent, a lot of this is familiar. The recent gossip trend aligns perfectly with AITA’s rise in popularity. Yet much of those elements have been about the titillation of knowing the people behind those stories were real, be they petty celebrities engaged in in-fighting or your neighbor’s neighbor’s best friend. AITA, however, along with other recently ascendant phenomena like the hit podcast Normal Gossip and The Cut’s anonymous confessionals, expand that concept even further. This is meta-gossip: gossip that’s not about a person we know, not about a famous person, and quite frequently not even about a real person. It is gossip in the abstract — gossip about the idea of a person and about ideas of human nature. It’s hardly surprising, then, that this approach easily led to numerous spin-offs in theme and variation; every time you think you’ve reached the end of the offshoots of offshoots of advice subs and curation subs, another one pops up with the slightest variation. For instance, AITA is the central nervous system of the network, but it doesn’t allow users to post a range of content that falls outside of what it deems “interpersonal conflict”; enter AITAH — short for “Am I The Asshole Here” — a crucial one-letter distinction, sure, but that sub does allow users to post a wide range of other drama. So, for instance, while AITA might not allow you to ask for advice after you’ve broken a man’s nose, the moderators who approve and deny posts on AITAH will embrace you. Alongside the advice subs themselves, curation subreddits for all the advice subs have also exploded. The biggest curation machine on-site is arguably r/BestofRedditorUpdates (BORU), which pulls stories from all around the site and even some advice columns off-site. Because BORU isn’t just limited to AITA, it gets a broader range of wild and unbelievable stories, from inappropriate music during sex to making your employees do period cosplay at a plantation. These curation subs, too, have been divided into their own areas of focus. If you want your curation to deliver a little more schadenfreude, there’s r/OhNoConsequences. Want content that’s not just written by an asshole but by a proper spawn of Satan? Try r/AmITheDevil. Not all of this rapid growth is attributable to the Google bump. A BORU moderator who goes by boringhistoryfan speculated to Vox that the success of these stories is less about search engine magic and more about people seeking engaging material from an easily accessible platform, “wanting content they can relate to and respond to.” Redditor amireallyreal, another BORU mod, was more direct, explaining that people embrace these twisty tales “for the same reason they like reality TV.” They explained, “They like drama, emotion, and laughs. They get all the excitement without any of the stress of actually being involved in these scenarios. This is just reality TV but in written form.” This hunger for more is an extra boost for the meta-subs, because “having an entire saga compiled in one place makes for easy access to the whole story.” Often those sagas take up multiple posts, spawning entire mini-arcs across the website as updates to what began as a single story become an ongoing narrative. Such updates can be piecemeal, incomplete, and scattered in different places throughout either the forum, a user’s profile, or in comments. It can take work to even find them, much less curate them. It’s no wonder, then, that increasingly, audiences of this type of melodramatic content are turning toward sources outside of Reddit itself to get it. Dustin Storm, a.k.a. YouTuber and podcaster Dusty Thunder, says he was “never a Reddit head.” It was his wife and daughter who loved the site’s stories. “So when they pulled me into this, I essentially became a mouthpiece or a bridge to the other non-Reddit heads because I’m not one.” Storm’s family members had been seeing more and more creators on Instagram and TikTok turn to narrating the Reddit stories they so enjoyed. They encouraged him to start the podcast; now Storm reads posts on his show, curated by his wife and daughter. In order to react authentically to the stories as he reads them on air, Storm actively avoids the Reddit advice subs so he won’t get spoiled. The formula has paid off; since he started his show in 2022, his audience has topped 30,000 subscribers on YouTube and nearly a million TikTok followers. “It’s a different kind of entertainment,” he said. “Instead of tuning into Grey’s Anatomy, now they’re jumping on and listening to some of the crazy stories that have been going on Reddit, and it’s just a completely different form of content that people have latched onto. As long as there’s no shortage of drama in the world right now, at least it flows through Reddit.” Storm’s podcast, YouTube, and TikTok are among many dedicated to surfacing this content for broader audiences, including hits like the Two Hot Takes podcast and its various platforms. TikTok has also given rise to an endless array of strange faceless accounts devoted to narrating Reddit stories while playing uncanny footage of, for example, racing games or Minecraft parkour videos. Want your subreddit drama with a side of food videos? You can have that, too. Many of the off-platform content creators trawl the meta forums because they have serialized stories and a sense (sometimes) of resolution. Their appeal makes sense; not only are Redditors churning out a bottomless well of free content for podcasters and other creators to curate, but the stories themselves reside in that irresistible space between the real and the fictional: just believable enough to seem plausible, but escalated enough to feel like pure escapism. Their popularity has expanded beyond the content creator milieu; media outlets like People and The New York Post have generated reams of articles just built on repurposed advice subreddit posts, now repackaged into generalized human interest stories of nameless, faceless gossip. Of course, there’s no way to fact-check the veracity of these Reddit stories. You might think that the growing influx of stories that seem to be total fakes — garish fantasies of revenge or validation — would make them less appealing to readers, but the opposite effect seems to have taken hold. “We aren’t too concerned with whether posts are fake or real and it can become very difficult to tell whether a post is fake or real based on anecdotal evidence,” BORU moderator amireallyreal said. Fans seem to feel the same way. “To me, it’s fake no matter what,” Storm said. “It doesn’t touch me. It doesn’t affect me. It doesn’t change things. So for us, it’s entertainment, number one. And number two, it’s an exercise in being able to make better decisions and relationships. And if it serves that purpose, I give zero shits if it’s real or fake.” Storm acknowledged the difficulty of knowing the veracity of the stories but joked that the wildest ones were probably true. Indeed, my anecdotal experience of reading AITA or BORU usually involves being convinced a post is fake only to encounter multiple people in the comments relating similar experiences; the implausibility of a post often seems to stretch no further than one person’s lived experience. Ironically, Storm told me that the Dusty Thunder subreddit, which they began as an easy way of allowing his audience to submit their own stories to the podcast, had now become an example of the very subreddits the podcast was narrating. “We originally started it as kind of a submission portal, but for our community to engage with as well,” he said. “It’s grown well beyond that. I’m sure there are a lot of people on there who have no idea who I am, but it’s taken on a life of its own now.” It’s a strange mini-version of the asshole ecosystem itself: An endless ouroboros of content, both feeding and digesting more and more content. “So some people are using the Dusty Thunder subreddit like AITA,” Storm said, laughing. “And they’re like, yeah, it’s a really weird name. I don’t get it. But I like the stories.”