Reddit's r/AmItheAsshole community is thriving, ready and willing to pass judgment

The Sunday Magazine9:54Reddit's r/AmItheAsshole community is thriving, ready and willing to pass judgment

In 2013, Marc Beaulac was facing a dilemma at work: there was an office conflict brewing over the thermostat, between the men who wanted it turned down and the women who wanted it higher.

He felt that because the men were stuck wearing suits, the women should just dress warmer. But it left him wondering if maybe he was in the wrong.

So he turned to the online discussion website Reddit and created a forum, known as a subreddit, where he explained the situation and then asked a simple question: Am I the asshole?

He received only one response from a user who agreed that his position was somewhat reasonable. 

Little did he know that a decade later, that subreddit — called r/AmItheAsshole — would become an online cultural phenomenon, amassing millions of subscribers, inspiring thinkpieces, and spawning offshoots in the form of podcasts, Twitter accounts and TikTok videos.

For some observers, this popularity and endurance is thanks, in part, to a shift toward a more ambiguous sense of morality in our culture.

"Our subreddit is basically the largest conflict resolution platform in the world," Beaulac, who is now 46 and works as a photographer and animal care specialist in Kennebunk, Maine, told CBC's The Sunday Magazine. 

The forum has 12.7 million subscribers. According to the most recent data available on Subreddit Stats, it generates an average of 43 posts and more than 2,000 comments each day. However, both the fan-run statistics site and Beaulac, who still moderates the forum, say the actual figures are multiple times higher. (Subreddit Stats cites changes Reddit recently made to third-party access to its content as the the reason for its out-of-date data.)

For the third year in a row, r/AmItheAsshole (also known as r/AITA) ranked as the most-viewed Reddit community in Canada, according to the website.

Crowdsourced judgments

In Beaulac's view, the forum's strength lies in the fact that the feedback is crowdsourced, diverse — and anonymous.

Unlike traditional advice columns where one expert delivers opinions and guidance, millions of Reddit users are invited to weigh in on any given situation — and they don't always agree.

"It's not about someone saying, 'Show me everything I want to hear and show me my existing opinions reflected back on me by some algorithm that knows what I want,'" says Beaulac.

"It's people saying, 'Here's the way I conduct myself and I'm putting myself out there for anyone else in the world to tell me if it's right or wrong.'"

Questions gravitate toward similar themes: work conflicts, disagreements with friends and family, drama with in-laws. There are questions like, "AITA for kicking out one of my bridesmaids for showing up in the wrong dress?" Or, "AITA for buying lower grade steaks when my in-laws visit and serving my mom and dad Wagyu?"

Once a submitter posts their question, readers can comment and are expected to leave one of four judgments: YTA (You're the asshole), where the submitter is deemed to be in the wrong; NTA (Not the asshole), where the other party is considered to be wrong; ESH (Everyone sucks here), where both parties are wrong; or the rare NAH (No asshole), where both parties acted appropriately, but the situation just sucks. 

Users can then vote on the best comments. Whatever judgment gets the most votes after 24 hours becomes the final verdict. 

According to the community rules, submitters must "accept the judgment and move on," although it's not uncommon to see some keep trying to justify their actions in the comments.

'Collective moral sense-making'

There is a lot of appeal in a community where people can discuss ethics, morality and norms of everyday life — especially when our everyday lives feel more and more ambiguous, says Jacob Hirsh, an associate professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management at the University of Toronto.

"The whole process is kind of like a collective moral sense-making, where we're all trying to figure out where the lines are, because the lines are not clearly defined in most of our lives," he says. 

According to Hirsh, it's nice for people to have a space — especially one that's anonymous and separate from the actual people they're having a conflict with —  to "try and figure out, 'OK, this is good, this is bad.'"

"That exercise itself, I think, provides a greater sense of moral clarity, which we might not find in the day-to-day noise of our social conflicts."

Hirsh says that the recent rise in popularity of r/AITA may be connected to the global and political shifts over the last few years, like Trump's 2016 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In 2018,  the subscriber count sat below 100,000. By the beginning of 2020, it had surpassed 1.6 million. In the last year alone, it has gained more than seven million subscribers.

"Certainly in the late 2010s moving on to 2020, we had a lot more political conflict that we're experiencing in our lives, huge political divisions and polarization," Hirsh said. "And this, again, undermines the sense of moral clarity and moral certainty."

Being mindful of biases

As more and more people look to r/AITA to make sense of the world, it's important to be mindful of the community's potential inherent biases.

Reddit users skew younger, are predominantly male and are mostly in the United States, according to data gathered by Statista. Parts of Reddit have been accused of varying levels of misogyny.

Asking for an opinion from a large group of people can help mute the "simple, silly" biases held by some individuals, says Regina Rini, a philosophy professor who holds the Canada Research Chair in social reasoning at York University.

"But it doesn't get rid of big systemic social biases like racism and sexism because lots of people exhibit racism and sexism."

These biases are something that Rini is paying close attention to as a consultant on a project called Delphi, which is training an AI program on morality.

The project is using posts from r/AITA as part of the datasets.

"There are lots of social biases hidden in the data we have to be careful about," she said. "But as a research project, as a first step to see how this would be implemented in the future, it's promising so far."

'Train wreck factor'

For the average Reddit user, Rini says that r/AITA can still be a useful resource, as long as they keep in mind that the responses they're reading may have a bit of a skew.

She says that the forum may be most useful in cases where the problems are more ambiguous, "situations where you can tell from the beginning, it's really not clear what the answer is.

"Those are cases where I think it's worthwhile to seek strangers' input." 

As for what posts are most popular in the subreddit, Beaulac, the creator, says he thinks the vast majority of subscribers are looking for high drama, what he calls the "train wreck factor."

But Beaulac himself prefers the stories that have lower stakes, where people aren't being disinvited from weddings, losing friends or having their lives ruined. 

"For me, frankly, you give me a small argument about somebody deciding that you're using the dishwasher wrong and insisting upon it, and I will love it."