Over the last few years, R/AmItheAsshole (AITA) — Reddit’s one-stop clearinghouse for internet drama, comeuppances, and popcorn gallery judgments on the behavior of strangers — has ascended rapidly from niche forum to mainstream forum to omnipresent cultural juggernaut.
The 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.
The stories are typically both specific and archetypal: There’s the bride feeling upstaged on her wedding day, the woman whose husband insists on bringing his sister with them on their honeymoon, the airline passenger who wonders if she should have given up her first-class seat for a stranger’s child.
AITA has prompted numerous spinoffs — not just advice subreddits and confessional subreddits that get at the same yen for revelation and judgment, but subreddits devoted to filtering only the best (or worst) stories.
This Reddit sprawl has spilled over outside of the platform, spawning a whole internet AITA ecosystem. 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 also spawned endless merch, from coffee mugs to children’s book parodies to self-help journals.
What is it about these endlessly tawdry tales that have us so addicted?
For one, AITA built on the promise of previous advice subreddits by streamlining the comment section debates into a simple, clean voting system that cut down on lots of needless arguing and got to the point: Were you the asshole or not?
As a cultural phenomenon, the impact of AITA, which was created in 2013, 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 have even drawn their own obsessive scrutiny.
The recent gossip trend aligns perfectly with AITA’s rise in popularity. AITA, however, 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 human nature.
Often the sagas take up multiple posts, spawning entire mini-arcs across the website as what began as a single story becomes an ongoing narrative. Such updates can be piecemeal, incomplete, and scattered across the forum, a user’s profile, or the 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 to sources outside Reddit 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. Now, Storm reads them on his podcast. 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.”
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.
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 would make them less appealing to readers, but the opposite seems to be true.
"For us, it’s entertainment, number one. And number two, it’s an exercise in being able to make better decisions and relationships,” Storm said. “And if it serves that purpose, I give zero shits if it’s real or fake.”
