(“People will go through a breakup and post revenge porn, and we’re not going to have that,” Anne explained. They forbid external links or images of any kind. They forbid alpha and beta, because that dichotomy attracts the Red Pill crowd. She is perfectly aware that no one in r/relationships would mistake her for a democratic leader.Īnne’s rules forbid gendered insults, including bitch, obviously, but also dick, somewhat perplexingly. We don’t have to explain ourselves to anybody,” she said.
She doesn’t believe in getting worked up over it she just believes in rooting it out. I don’t like bad behavior,” Anne explained. Asshole isn’t a word she uses because she’s angry it’s just a clinical diagnosis of a person who operates by default in bad faith. There’s no troll post she hasn’t seen before, no condescending jab she could ever find charming. As we talked, she called people “buttheads” and “assholes” and “pigs” liberally-mostly the men of notoriously seedy and misogynistic spaces like r/TheRedPill and r/MGTOW (“Men Going Their Own Way”). Though she would never let anyone commit them to the public record of r/relationships, some of Anne’s favorite words to use conversationally are elementary-school insults. (Anne asked that I not “dox” her or any of the subreddit’s other moderators and instead use pseudonyms, because their moderation style results in banning dozens of users every month, many of whom might harass her team indefinitely over their decisions.) She’s been a chat-room manager and a forum guide now she moderates more than a dozen subreddits, mostly pertaining to interpersonal relationships. She brought dial-up internet to her hometown in the mountains. “We maintain by removing as much stuff as we remove,” she told me flatly in a phone call, stating what should be obvious to me.Īnne has been on the internet pretty much the whole time there’s been anything to do here, holding on to the same username since the 1980s. She’s been leading the moderation team for r/relationships for close to a decade-long before mainstream publications started running roundups of the subreddit’s worst stories-and if you ask her, it’s not even that hard to maintain civil discourse and community. That’s because of Anne, a pseudonymous 58-year-old woman who lives in California. You can imagine the conversation spiraling out of control, but you rarely see it happen. And as many different schools of thought as there are for red wine on silk, there are exponentially more for dealing with infidelity, dishonesty, poor personal hygiene, a partner who is perfectly kind in person but then tweets all his negative feelings about the relationship on a public Twitter account.
This is a space to air your dirty laundry and request that perfect strangers tell you how to get the stains out.
Last month, it recorded more than 40 million pageviews, and added an average of 1,516 new members each day. With more than 2.6 million members, r/relationships is currently number 74 on the site by size-a little less popular than basketball, a little more popular than tattoos. There are more than 1 million subreddits on Reddit, though the number of active communities is somewhere around 140,000. “I think I expected a bit of advice?” he said when interviewed by New York magazine, incredulous, or pretending to be.