True Facts about Sh*tRedditSays

One of the strangest things about doing this blog is all the things I ‘ve learned about myself in the process. I don’t mean all the insights into my inner being I’ve gained,  though there’s been a bit of that. I  mean all the completely untrue things I’ve learned from people who hate me.

For some reason, many of the people who most hate this blog– many of whom have never read it — aren’t satistfied with criticizing me for what I do and who I am; they find it necessary to make up many new and horrible and not-actually-true things to criticize me for: That I plant the things I quote on this blog to make Men’s Rightsers look bad, that I write all the comments myself (all the hundreds of thousands of them) to make Man Boobz look more popular.

Oh, and that I want all men cuckolded.

To those who hate me and this site, I and the Man Boobz commentariat have become what sociologist Stanley Cohen called “folk devils,” convenient scapegoats around which various urban legends — or in this case internet legends — have grown like mushrooms.

The ShitRedditSays empire on Reddit has developed a similar mythos of its own. ShitRedditSays started out as a subreddit to collect together and skewer the worst, most bigoted nonsense that regularly posted and upvoted on Reddit; it grew into a robust Reddit counterculture that’s really one of the only good things about the site.

But to most Redditors, it seems, the SRS folk devils really are akin to the devil, and they are accused of all sorts of preposterous things on a daily basis — many of which suggest that SRS wields vast and nefarious powers behind the scenes on Reddit and possibly even in the real world. There’s so much of this nonsense that the SRSers have started a whole subreddit devoted to the SRS Mythos.

Basically, all the preceding was sort of a long-winded preface to me saying that I just discovered SRSMythos and have been really enjoying reading it.

Here are some of the not-so-true facts about SRS catalogued there:

A claim that

my friend used to mod there [on SRS], he and his buddies from Stormfront.org started it as a joke to get people to hate politically correct liberals and black people.

The notion that SRS was secretly started as a joke by Nazis or other bigots is one of Reddit’s favorite conspiracy theories.

A claim from a Men’s Rights Redditor that one of the Men’s Rights subreddit mods is a secret SRS agent.

Another Redditor, familiar to anyone who reads the anti-SRS and/or Men’s Rights subreddits, offers a convoluted theory about how SRS is all part of a weird eugenics experiment.

Someone called againstSRS complains  that “THEY’RE the ones who try to make fun of US for so-called “ridiculous” conspiracy theories? Our theories about SRS and women destroying society are more grounded in concrete facts than their entire sense of reality.”

Someone else asserts that SRS is a

horrible horrible subreddit full of Nazi Feminists that aren’t actually for equality. They hate all men, and think that every man is a rapist. I’ve seen people banned from it just for mentioning that they were a guy while commenting.

Actually, SRS did its own demographic surveys and found that most SRSers — -somewhere in the range of 57% to 59% — were dudes. Granted, that’s a low percentage of men for Reddit — which is overall 80% male — but not exactly evidence that SRSers are a bunch of man-hating feeeeemale separatists.

Check it out. There’s a lot of fascinating stuff there, whether you’re studying the sociology of scapegoating, or if you just like seeing Redditors post idiotic crap.