Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Website / Reddit

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/reddit_alien_hofo.png
Snoo, the time-traveling alien mascot of Reddit.
"Dive into anything"
—Reddit's Motto

Reddit is a very large news aggregator similar to Digg or Fark. Its structure is based around "subreddits", separate topic-specific aggregators which can be easily created.

Although Reddit isn't a wiki, users have the power to create their own subreddits on pretty much any topic. In fact, it is probably because of this very aspect of Reddit that it has proven to be actually more addictive than TV Tropes. Don't believe us? Here, try it for yourself, but don't say we didn't warn you.

Works hosted on Reddit:

From r/nosleep:

Other:

Some subreddits have inspired works of their own:

r/tropes:

    open/close all folders 

    A to C 
  • Accentuate the Negative: Subreddits dedicated to mockery (like /r/thatHappened or /r/cringe), especially the former, which expresses mocking disbelief towards almost anything. Extreme examples of this are in turn mocked by /r/nothingeverhappens.
  • Addled Addict: r/tooktoomuch showcases people appearing to be under the influence of various substances engaging in bizarre behavior.
  • Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: /r/holdmybeer is a collection of gifs depicting people performing comically ill-thought-out acts, generally titled "HMB while I [action]".
  • The Alleged Car: /r/Shitty_Car_Mods/ is all about this, and /r/Justrolledintotheshop is mostly about attempts to fix similar disasters on wheels.
  • Alt Text: /r/AskReddit's snoo says "Ass Credit" when hovered over.
  • Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: The best case scenario for an /r/entitledparents story, where the poor kid will either look like they want to die because of their parent's narcissism-by-proxy-induced idiocy or calling them out for being terrible, at times apologizing for their parents' stupidity even though it's not their fault.
  • Anti-Climax: In March 2013, dont_stop_me_smee posted this gallery showing a locked safe. 9 Months later, somebody finally got it open and inside was a spider.
  • A Rare Sentence: r/brandnewsentence is dedicated to cataloguing these.
  • Artifact Title:
    • /r/AdviceAnimals took its name from the "Advice Dog" image macro, which is now virtually non-existent. Not all of them have animals and most don't give any advice except the "Advice Mallard".
    • /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu is named after the expression for rage, as the subreddit is for Rage Comics. However, they no longer always involve rage.
    • /r/TikTokCringe was originally for only posting cringe content from TikTok, but it later allowed all content from TikTok to be posted, and now there are typically more comedy and wholesome videos than cringe.
  • April Fools' Day: It may be more common for large subs to not do something silly on the first of April. Examples include:
    • In 2012, the Subreddits for /r/Soccer and /r/NFL switched flairs. Hilarity ensued.
    • On April 1st, 2013, Reddit posted a blog post stating that it has purchased Team Fortress 2 and would be implementing its gameplay into the standard Reddit experience. The TF2 blog, on the other hand, stated the opposite.
    • On the same day, /r/StarWars and /r/StarTrek switched backgrounds, to much confusion.invoked
    • On April 1st, 2014, there was much buzz on /r/AssassinsCreed about Ubisoft announcing that Watch_Dogs was the real title of their secretive Assassin's Creed: Comet project. Having apparently forgotten what day it was, the excitement even spilled over into /r/Gaming. Funnily enough, when the game was released, it was confirmed that it does, in fact take place in the same universe as Assassin's Creed.invoked
    • In 2015, the Subreddits for Homestuck and Steven Universe swapped places for the day, similarly to 2013. So /r/homestuck led to the Steven Universe Subreddit and vice-versa. This led to many confused fans on both ends. Both of the Subreddits lampshaded this. Steven Universe's "users here now" counter read "X confused homestucks" and Homestuck's read "X wondering if Steven Universe ever really existed in the first place".
    • Similarly, in 2021, the subreddits for Danganronpa and Five Nights at Freddy's switched places.
    • Also in 2015, the staff created a subreddit called "the button" (/r/thebutton) which featured a prominent button, which you could click or not click. The button was attached to a timer counting down from 60. At whatever time you clicked, the button would reset — for everyone — and you would be given a flair based on that number. Soon, two sides emerged, pressers and non-pressers. By the second, there were over twenty factions.
    • Elsewhere on Reddit, /r/TwitchPlaysPokemon, in a moment of Fun with Acronyms, changed their page and posted on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
    • For 2015, the DataIsBeautiful subreddit became a shrine to Data from Star Trek.
    • For 2017, A subreddit called /r/place opened, a public canvas where you could place a coloured pixel of your choosing every 5 minutes, but placed pixels could be overridden with another. Just like the button, several factions appeared almost immediately. It was reopened in 2022, featuring a few upgrades over the original 2017 canvas, such as more colors to choose from and two separate canvas expansions.
    • In 2019, r/polandball temporary bans drawing in the traditional ball based method.
    • Also in 2019, r/animemes and r/historymemes swapped, resulting in the surprising creation of a large number of history-based anime memes.
    • In 2023, the two subreddits for Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft swapped styles, and each subreddit was filled with screenshots of each other's game. A lot of people even posted how their respective "home cities" in the game looked a lot different.
  • Asshole Victim: r/ProRevenge and r/NuclearRevenge are about people taking revenge on their tormentors in ways that have ruined lives, and in the most extreme cases ended them.
  • Astroturf:
    • Reddit's founders, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, admitted to submitting links under various usernames when the site first launched to make it look like it there were more people using it than there actually were.
    • If a heavily downvoted comment gets gilded, it's common for the poster in question to be accused of gilding themselves with an alternate account. This mindset applies even more so if it's an admin's comment.
    • Given the subject matter of /r/conspiracy, it's probably not all that surprising to see every other comment accusing someone of either this or malicious LARPing, especially when a particular conspiracy theory gains enough traction.
  • As You Know: Any sort of TIL (Today I Learned) or "lifehack" threads will either be genuinely informative, or something that's already common knowledge or generic tricks we all learned in our childhood.
  • Bait-and-Switch: Because you can make a subreddit for almost any type of content with nearly any kind of title, you can come up with a fake subreddit name to bait people into clicking on a dead link. /r/SubsIFellFor documents such instances. Conversely, /r/SubsIThoughtIFellFor are for instances where someone expects a link to a non-existent subreddit, only to discover it's real.
  • Balkan Bastard: Played for Laughs on r/2balkan4you, which is mostly a parody of the Misplaced Nationalism found in the Balkans.
  • Banned from Argo: You can and will be banned from /r/relationships for posting anything from that subreddit to SubredditDrama, and Word of God from their moderators confirms this.
    • On a more sour note, several subreddits use bots to ban anyone who posts in certain other subreddits.invoked
  • Based on a Dream: r/somnivexillology, where people post flags they see in dreams, and r/thomastheplankengine for memes seen in dreams. The latter tend to be very Surreal Humor.invoked
  • Becoming the Mask: Quite a few subreddits that were initially designed to mock or parody certain behaviors end up becoming shrines to what they were mocking, and sometimes it can be hard to tell if this is what has happened.
  • Belief Makes You Stupid: There are a lot of subreddits dedicated to bashing religion. r/atheism and r/religiousfruitcake are two of the bigger examples, often going so far as to attack the very concept of religion itself as inherently evil. Occurs to a lesser extent in r/exchristian, r/exmuslim, r/exmormon, etc., though they serve more as a place where former believers can connect with one another and share their shared struggles.
    • Also inverted; needless to say, religious people generally don't appreciate their faiths being attacked and have formed their own subreddits to counter-bash the militant atheists. r/antitheistcheesecake is the antithesis to r/religiousfruitcake, and there are various r/ex(fruit/vegetable) subreddits, such as r/excarrots and r/extomatoes, which attack apostates from specific faiths.
  • Berserk Button:
    • /r/shitredditsays formerly had this status, since it's a haven for snarky feminists, and really hates jokes about rape. The subreddit also has a low tolerance for Black Comedy, sex jokes, racial humor, and transphobia. It flew both ways — mentions of SRS on other subreddits garnered outrage and anger over "SJW"s — although this has subsided (and SRS itself has become less relevant) after the late 2010s, as Reddit started more actively moderating hate speech on its platform, and as the things SRS is against started to be more clearly agreed upon as bad by the site's user base.
    • A mention of Colby the Dog will receive numerous responses of 'EVERY THREAD' or similar.
    • The firing of a popular admin responsible for the celebrity AMAs prompted many subreddits to temporarily go private in protest.
    • Several political views have the potential to trigger this when expressed.
    • Some subreddits have such a bad reputation on the site that you’ll get autobanned from other subreddits if you post on one.
  • Bittersweet Ending: The Colby the Dog story ends up like this. The poster and his wife get back together and the son sees a therapist over what happened, but the dog has to be sold.
  • Bold Inflation: Several subreddits have all of their text in allcaps and/or bolded font, whether as a subreddit rule or forced with CSS coding. /r/spacedicks has allcapital titles and comments as a subreddit rule, and comments posted that contain lowercase letters will be responded to with "WHAT CAN'T HEAR YOU". /r/FondantHate, a community dedicated to the hatred of the use of fondant on cakes, uses CSS styling to force all of its text to be in allcaps Arial Bold font.
  • Boss Battle: /r/bossfight posts pictures of strange objects, sculptures, animals, and costumes and gives them subtitles to present them as bosses in a video game or role-playing campaign.
  • Bothering by the Book: The essential theme of /r/MaliciousCompliance. This is where the OP is told to do something by a boss, teacher, cop, lawyer, HOA board, or any other sort of governing authority. But whatever the OP is asked to do, it's either done as literally as possible, or to the exact point the request was made and no further. This always ends with the target of OP's wrath getting in some kind of trouble when they either didn't think through the implications of what they were asking for or end up getting just enough metaphorical rope to hang themselves with. A common thread is the OP being told to do something by their boss, OP advising the boss against the action, the boss insisting on the action anyway, and OP doing the action while letting the logical conclusion of the action play itself out so that their boss ends up in hot water.
  • Brain Bleach: /r/eyebleach for washing away memories of /r/wtf or /r/fiftyfifty.
  • Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: This post:
    If you go on the goddamn internet it will still be "Did you check the weather/mail/bank account/for missing children/on whatever cause she presently is interested in?"
  • Broken Aesop: If you visit /r/relationships, this is almost certainly expected, and lampshaded frequently.
  • Broken Pedestal: /u/unidan was a biologist almost universally loved by Reddit until an incident in 2014 when he lost his temper and it was revealed he had been using alternate accounts to manipulate votes in his favour. He's now mostly just another in-joke (don't mention jackdaws), but many users still seem to mourn the loss.
  • Butt-Monkey: /r/SequelMemes (subreddit for the Star Wars sequels) is widely made fun of across the website because of the ubiquity of /r/PrequelMemes (its prequel counterpart). It doesn't help that a sizable amount of Sequel Memes' userbase hates the sequels rather than celebrates them.
  • Cats Are Mean: Cats show up a lot in /r/AnimalsBeingJerks, and jerks show up a lot in /r/CatSlaps. To be fair, cats show up in /r/AnimalsBeingBros as well.
  • Choosy Beggar: /r/ChoosingBeggars/ is all about this. The subreddit is dedicated to text messages, social media posts, etc. of people who are in clear need of something, but are being incredibly picky or have impossible standards for whatever they want. For instance, a relatively common kind of post in the subreddit is a person who is looking for a potential romantic partner, but with a list of "must-haves" that is either impossible to achieve or self-contradictory.
  • Christmas Carolers: Played for Horror in the Creepypasta “My Neighbor won’t stop singing Christmas carols”. The titular neighbors- the wife and daughter specifically- sing carols for days on end, never stopping, and will not respond to anything, even as they are peeing and crying, making it clear that something is wrong. They are being forced to sing by a race of goblins resembling pine trees, and anyone caught in a specific radius from one is magically compelled to join in the caroling forever- eventually, nearly the entire town joins in, with hordes of people forced to sing against their will before being devoured by the pine goblins.
  • Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Many, although _vargas_ is one of the most popular.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: /r/fuck Is full to the brim with this.
  • Comeback Tomorrow: The /r/staircasewit subreddit provides a place for users to place these thoughts.
  • Comically Missing the Point: When a Redditor does this in response to another user's post, it's known as "the ol' Reddit switcharoo" [sic]. A long list of these is maintained, with each one linking to the next.
  • Conspiracy Theorist: A fairly common sight in political threads.
    • According to /r/hailcorporate, every post is secretly a viral marketing campaign.
    • Then there's, of course, /r/conspiracy. Played with in that the sub's sidebar maintains an up-to-date list of confirmed conspiracies.
    • Parodied with /r/karmaconspiracy and /r/conspiratard, the latter of which is dedicated to mocking Truthers, Illuminati freaks, and Ufologists. r/amibeingdetained also sees this on a regular basis as a sub devoted to mocking sovereign citizens and "freemen upon the land".
    • While r/askhistorians usually tries to dispel those, the site's inherent pop voting and lack of peer review can produce occasions where fringe historical stances are upvoted and made pass as academic consensus.
  • Contagious Laughter: /r/ContagiousLaughter is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. It's videos of people laughing or doing funny things, only for everyone around them (and hopefully, the viewer) to start laughing with them.
  • Cool Car:
    • /r/Spotted, among others, is all about posting pictures of awesome vehicles.
    • This◊ is an actual NASCAR car sponsored by Reddit.
  • Cool Plane: many, both fictional and real, but one particular case is the SR-71. Every time it gets mentioned - every time - someone will post that story about the speed check. It got to the point it's now an inside meme, and the SR-71 eventually got its own subreddit.
  • Cordon Bleugh Chef: /r/ididnthaveeggs/ collects complaints from people who made stupid substitutions in online recipes and then complain that they didn't turn out well, because it's obviously the recipe's fault if they didn't follow it.
  • Cranky Landlord:
    • r/LandlordLove (despite the name) is a subreddit of people complaining about landlords they consider cruel.
    • r/LoveForLandlords is a parody of the above r/LandlordLove, in which users roleplay as the kinds of people the above subreddit complains about. Evicting tenants, raising rent, and other similar practices are bragged about and Played for Laughs.
  • Creator's Culture Carryover: With the exception of subreddits explicitly dedicated to other countries or cities, Reddit is heavily American-slanted, and many American redditors will automatically assume that any other users who don't include very obvious mistakes in their written English are themselves American. As a result, things like asking for, say, rust prevention advice in /r/DIY will result in redditors suggesting you buy Rustoleum brand chemicals, or asking about bicycle grease in /r/bicycling might get you suggestions for Phil's Wood Bearing Grease (prompting the obvious question "Who's Phil? Should I e-mail him?"). To say nothing of legal advice, which is state-specific, let alone country-specific.
    • Extremely apparent in Tech-Related subreddits, where any and all advice ends up being American-Centric, leading to confused Europeans trying to use Craigslist and being told to go to the nearest Walmart. The fact that most articles that end up being shared are written from an American point of view (As seen with the iPhone SE, as decent Chinese mid-ranger Androids are completely non-existent in the US) doesn't help.
    • Flip-flopped with /r/Android, as any question concerning budget phones will inevitably end up as a case of an Indian culture carryover, and a flood of recommendations for Xiaomi devices — despite the fact that they literally cannot work in the US due to not having the required bands to operate on most US 4G networks.
    • r/USDefaultism is dedicated to mocking these kinds of Americans.
  • Creepypasta: r/nosleep is Reddit's equivalent, though the mods scrub away badly-written examples.
  • Cringe Comedy: Several subs, including /r/cringe, /r/cringepics, or /r/cringetopia collect unintentional examples, though they have some accusations going against them of being too mean-spirited.
  • Cruel Twist Ending: The final hours of the 2022 r/place had the colors changed to only white, and thus forced the various communities that worked on the canvas to delete their own creations and blank out the canvas.
  • Cut Short: The infamous 'tree fiddy' (a South Park reference) stories posted by /u/thehealeroftri (and others) open with a typically believable, interesting premise, then right before the climax of the story, typically involve one of the main characters asking for $3.50, then turning into a prehistoric animal and swimming away.
  • Cute Kitten: See /r/cats, /r/aww, etc.
  • Cute Little Fangs: /r/CuteLittleFangs

    D to F 
  • The Dandy: /r/malefashionadvice is often accused of this; either they encourage a boring "uniform" look or they drift too far down "fashion-conscious" and into "effeminate".
  • Delusions of Eloquence: Like Know-Nothing Know-It-All, r/justneckbeardthings, r/thathappened, r/notliketheothergirls, and especially r/iamverysmart chronicle a lot of real-life examples of this. The subreddits are respectively about Dogged Nice Guys who act misogynistic while insisting they're nice people, telling stories that are obvious Blatant Lies, women who try to justify The Prima Donna behaviors, and people who get basic facts wrong while insisting that they're right.
  • Didn't Think This Through: The "Win Stupid Prizes" subreddit. It involves people doing things that any sane person could tell is a bad idea (playing a stupid game), only for this decision to result in predictably bad consequences (winning a stupid prize). Frequent targets of mockery include doing dangerous stunts with clearly unsafe equipment, sticking fireworks anywhere close to a human body, or trying to pick a fight with a clearly superior opponent.
  • Dirty Cop:
    • There isn't a day that goes by without a YouTube video being posted of a cop chokeholding or bodyslamming someone. It's enough to turn the most strident law-and-order hardliner into an anarchist. Often redditors have to remind themselves that most cops are not so cruel as the ones shown.
    • r/ACAB (and r/copaganda to a slightly lesser extent) is the logical extreme of this. The acronym means "All Cops Are Bastards", and in the minds of those who frequent this subreddit, not only are all cops inherently composed of pure grime, but the very concept of a police force is fundamentally evil and cops are nothing more than bigoted bullies who are glorified attack dogs for the upper class and will happily assault or flat-out kill anyone who isn't white or wealthy just for the sheer hell of it.
  • Disco Dan: /r/music is widely derided for its focus on classic rock. /r/lewronggeneration mocks internet denizens who complain about modern music, and frequently yearn for simpler times, before they were born.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: The whole point of /r/pettyrevenge, and taken to the extreme in /r/nuclearrevenge.
  • Dogs Are Dumb: A common joke on /r/DogShowerThoughts, though it tends to go hand in hand with Dumb Is Good.
  • Don't Explain the Joke: r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/ inverts this. The entire subreddit is dedicated to people explaining jokes, memes, and social media posts for people who don't get what they're supposed to be saying. The subreddit is named for Peter Griffin from Family Guy, who has a habit of doing this in-universe.
  • Donut Mess with a Cop: An anti-police subreddit is called r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut.
  • Dude, Not Funny!: invoked SRS is an entire subreddit dedicated to this reaction to various ostensibly bigoted jokes on the site.
  • Dreadful Musician: /r/CrappyMusic is full of them.
  • Drives Like Crazy: /r/IdiotsInCars/ is full of reckless driving and/or car crashes from people who refuse to obey the rules of the road.
  • Eagleland: /r/MURICA parodies Type 2. There's several subreddits out there dedicated to bashing America, and it's not uncommon to see anger over the Pledge of Allegiance. Ironically, a lot of the users of these subreddits are American themselves.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness:
    • Subreddits weren't introduced until 2008, 3 years after the site launched.
    • AskReddit questions were previously more personal, and could ask for assistance.
    • Account suspensions were introduced in 2015; before then, the only site-wide punishment for rule-breakers was shadow-banning, which was usually reserved for spammers.
  • The Eeyore: /r/2meirl4meirl, which is mostly reposting suicidal, extremely self-loathing, and nihilistic reposts from Tumblr and elsewhere, mixed in with pleas for death. It's like Shinji Ikari, Marvin the Paranoid Android, and Eeyore ruining all your favorite tumblr posts.
  • Enemy Mine: They have a long-standing rivalry with 4chan, mainly due to being accused of forcing Advice Animals and stealing 4Chan memes (in some instances, they did steal, but in others, they didn't). But when 9GAG started gaining steam and started taking credit for copied memes from both sites, they put aside their mutual dislike of each other to combine forces to take 9GAG down.
    • In a way, they and 4Chan can be seen as Vitriolic Best Buds because while they both most assuredly take potshots at each other on site, many of the users frequent both sites, whether they want to admit it or not.
  • Entitled to Have You: A frequently seen mindset on r/niceguys. The subreddit is dedicated to mocking the mindset of "nice guys" who act entitled to dates and/or a girlfriend. Posts typically show text messages from these "nice guys" showing their true colors at the slightest hint of rejection or disinterest.
  • Epic Fail: /r/therewasanattempt documents these.
  • Erudite Stoner: /r/StonerPhilosophy. At times.
  • Eskimos Aren't Real: There's an infamous post by a person who grew up believing that Finland isn't a real country, explaining that his parents convinced him that Finland was just an elaborate conspiracy created by Japan to get around fishing regulations. The post eventually led to the creation of an entire (satirical) subreddit dedicated to exposing the "Finland conspiracy".
  • Even the Guys Want Him: If a photo of a sufficiently attractive male appears, there will be several comments about going gay for him. Multiply that by about 200 for Ridiculously Photogenic Guy.
  • Everyone Has Standards: /r/jesuschristreddit, which collects offensive, often out of context comments for redditors to make fun of.
  • Everything Is an Instrument: /r/SoundsLikeMusic chronicles videos of people using unconventional objects as musical instruments, or of animals and things unintentionally sounding like music or beats. Examples include a large indoor fan turned into a substitute for an electric guitar, a person trying to time their nail gun usage to a nearby band performing a march, a washing machine with a loose drum producing a beat almost identical to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” (to which the person filming joins in with their guitar and vocals) and a dog howling to someone's blues saxophone practice.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
    • Subreddit names, by their nature, are usually pretty descriptive or obvious (/r/blurrypicturesofcats, /r/nocontext, /r/foodporn etc). Some titles for subreddits can avert this, or require specific knowledge for the user to understand the reference the subreddit name is making (/r/dontdeadopeninside, /r/wheredidthesodago, /r/leopardsatemyface, /r/thomastheplankengine, to name a few).
    • Novelty accounts, users who always post with a gimmick, generally have usernames that say exactly what they do. For example, Sure_Ill_Draw_That posts a drawing of whatever comment he replies to, and Your_Post_As_A_Movie will turn random pictures posted by redditors into movie posters (replete with taglines).
  • Exact Words:
    • /r/MaliciousCompliance is filled with stories about redditors spiting rude or obnoxious people by following their requests to the letter, typically leading to a disastrous result they had not anticipated.
    • This bacon burrito is wrapped in bacon.
  • Face Palm: /r/FacePalm is for posts that elicit this reaction.
  • Felony Misdemeanor: Each sub has its own set of rules for conduct on top of Reddit's sitewide rules, and their enforcement is at the moderator team's discretion. Different subs may have considerably different standards for what warrants a temporary or permanent ban, including offenses that would receive only post deletion and/or a warning in other places, and let's leave it at that.
  • Fictional Flag: r/vexillology and its parody equivalent r/vexillologycirclejerk focus on the discussion of and the creation of flags. Users often create original flags, including those of Alternate History countries, Fictional Countries, or redesigns of current flags.
  • Fight Scene: r/FightPorn is dedicated to videos of real-life fights, from sanctioned matches to street brawls.
  • Five-Finger Discount: /r/shoplifting was dedicated to this trope, prior to it being banned. They even had an arch-nemesis in the form of /r/lossprevention.
  • Food Porn: /r/FoodPorn and /r/DessertPorn. /r/Cooking, as well. /r/ShittyFoodPorn is intended to be something like Food Gorn, but unless the posted edibles are truly atrocious, there'll be at least one redditor commenting how they'd gladly eat that.
  • For Great Justice: The spirit of /r/KarmaCourt, a subreddit for trials of redditors who have committed various "karma crimes" on Reddit such as claiming someone else's work as their own, or lying for karma.
  • For the Evulz: The denizens of /rfoundsatan partake in rather heinous pranks, with potentially chaotic results.
  • Frequently-Broken Unbreakable Vow: /r/SubredditDrama has a rule against voting down comments in linked threads. However, when a thread is linked, the loser in the argument tends to accumulate a suspiciously low voting total. SRS also has a similar policy against participating in linked threads, but is also frequently accused of brigading.
  • Fridge Logic: Invoked with /r/Showerthoughts, for all those odd thoughts you get from pondering too much. Also goes along with Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror.

    G to I 
  • Gag Haircut: /r/Justfuckmyshitup collects pictures of people with bad or just strange haircuts.
  • Gorn: /r/Spacedicks and /r/watchpeopledie are were subreddits dedicated entirely to this. And by that, we mean real life gore. It would be an understatement to say that these subreddits are controversial. As of 2021, both of these subreddits no longer exist.
  • Gun Porn: /r/GunPorn.
  • Hair-Trigger Temper: Every other day, Reddit launches a counterattack somewhere. Or on itself.
  • Haute Cuisine Is Weird: /r/WeWantPlates/ collects pictures of restaurant dishes served in or on bizarre and unappetizing objects instead of on plates. /r/StupidFood is also about stupid, pretentious, and/or overly trendy food, overlapping occasionally with /r/shittyfoodporn for food and food products that are merely stupid.
  • He-Man Woman Hater: Quite a few women (and men) on Reddit have complained about the site's skewed demographics (see There Are No Girls on the Internet) and outrageous sexism before, especially concentrated in /r/theredpill. /r/shitredditsays is the main hub for these complaints (although it's a subreddit that's widely accused of questionable behavior and comments in and of itself).
  • Heavy Metal: /r/metal also includes all of Heavy Metal's sub-genres.
  • Heinous Hyena: the whole point of /r/hyenas is to subvert this trope.
    • Hyenas are also a popular subject for /r/natureismetal, and are generally unpopular with most posters/commenters there.
  • Hide Your Lesbians: The site has an entire subreddit called Sappho And Her Friend dedicated to this. While some examples are just ambiguous, many people ignore the just-as-logical LGBT explanation of characters' actions, others are obvious yet still being explained away as simply just close friends, roommates etc.
  • Hilariously Abusive Childhood: The stories posted by /u/rogersimon10, all of which involve his father beating him with jumper cables.
  • Hive Mind: Reddit sometimes acts like one in individual threads to troll the OP, mostly just for laughs.
    • One OP accidentally changed his language settings to Spanish, and posted a thread to /r/askreddit about how to switch it back. Every response was written in Spanish, even an admin's.
    • An infamously bizarre example is /r/CatsStandingUp, where nearly every word and every post has to simply be "Cat." Saying anything else in the sub gets you an automatic ban.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: /r/LeopardsAteMyFace/ documents instances of people's own actions backfiring on them. Typically, posts will contain people expressing regret for things like a political policy that they were in favor of or voted for, but didn't think through all of the implications of the policy's implementation.
  • Honor Before Reason: The admins have refused to deal with some of the subreddits that promote illegal activity because it would violate their belief in freedom of speech, only deleting subreddits like /r/jailbait after media pressure.
  • The Horseshoe Effect: A few Subreddits are based on this concept.
    • Stormfront or SJW? challenges the reader to identify whether a given statement was said by someone expressing an opinion that is on the extreme right-wing (Stormfront) or extreme left-wing (SJW).
    • Men Kampf observes how Nazi-esque statements from social justice warriors become when substituting "men" for "Jews" and "women" for "Aryans".
  • Hugh Mann: The idea of /r/totallynotrobots is to act like a Robot would, while also stumbling on many a humanism robots would be confused by.
  • Humans Are Morons: An extremely high number of Reddit users are the profile picture of this trope.
  • Humans Are Bastards: A huge portion of the users on the site. This is also what you'll probably think browsing through /r/morbidreality. There is also /r/Iamatotalpieceofshit and /r/Fuckthesepeople who are pretty much named after the featured individuals.
  • Hurricane of Puns: Entire threads of puns are not uncommon. There's even an entire subreddit dedicated to puns, simply named /r/puns.
  • Hypocritical Humor: Commonly used by /r/circlejerk, a Self-Parody subreddit, when pointing out Reddit's hypocrisies.
    "Hot girl posting on reddit? Upvoted! Oh wait you're not very attractive? REDDIT IS NOT YOUR FACEBOOK!!"
    "I hate COD because all the games are similar, but I love Pokemon."
    "9GAG sucks for stealing our original content. Also, upvote this 4chan image!"
  • I Ate WHAT?!: In several /r/AmITheAsshole posts, a person will have eaten something they would not have eaten otherwise; one such post had 2 young girls obsessed with rabbits unintentionally eating rabbit meat that they were told was chicken. A large number of posts on this and other relationship-based subs are about people being deliberately fed foods they're allergic to, usually by people convinced that food allergies aren't real or that the victim is faking them.
  • Idiot Programming: Invoked in /r/SoftwareGore, which is images of software with very odd or broken behaviors due to strange glitches or errors in the code.
  • Ice-Cream Koan: The entire point of r/NotInteresting, particularly with regards to meme templates.
  • I Have This Friend: /r/MyFriendWantsToKnow.
  • I Just Want to Be Badass: r/iamverybadass is dedicated to images and videos of people (usually men) trying to appear tough and warrior-like, but who just come off as sad or pathetic.
  • I Read It for the Articles: /r/WatchItForThePlot, which is a subreddit dedicated to nude scenes, boob shots, and sex scenes in movies and TV shows.
  • Inflationary Dialogue: A common gag in the comments, e.g. for news stories where a large amount of money was seized or embezzled, is to create a chain where each commenter makes note of the amount, which shrinks each time, suggesting that each commenter skimmed some of the money or whatever it is as it went down the line.
  • Innocent Innuendo: A number of subs have names that sound NSFW, but their content is anything but. For example, r/Tightpussy is about pictures of cats in small or narrow spaces.
  • Insane Troll Logic: Some posts on /r/facepalm are based on this.
  • Insufferable Genius: r/iamverysmart revolves around some of the worst examples of people trying way too hard to sound smart. Ironically, one of the top posts on the sub is a headline of a news article where famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says that anyone who boasts about their high IQ score is a loser.
  • Intentionally Awkward Title:
    • The "SFW Porn" subreddits all have "porn" in their titles, but it's Not What It Looks Like— they just mean it in the sense of Scenery Porn. For instance, the subreddit r/FoodPorn is dedicated to pictures of well-made and/or tasty-looking food; nothing in the sub is actually pornographic. That doesn't prevent these subreddits being blocked by overzealous network filters.
    • The Incest Porn subreddit is one of the few that actually contains porn.
    • Various subreddits labelled "circlejerk" are almost always about doing the act metaphorically; that is, it's an echo chamber where everyone spouts the same opinions to each other over and over.
  • Internet Counterattack: EA's attempt to justify its controversial Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) microtransaction policy was not well received, suffice it to say. The fandom responded by brigading the thread and downvoting its most popular response: "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment", to -668,000, making it by far and away the most downvoted comment in the site's historynote .
  • The Internet Is for Porn: The large large large selection of NSFW subreddits. There's even a "randnsfw" button that, if enabled, will carry you to a random subreddit that is wholly tagged as "not safe for work", and the vast majority of those are porn. Except those that aren’t.
  • Internet Jerk: The large userbase and loose moderation leads to many, many examples of the G.I.F.T in action.
  • It Makes Sense in Context: /r/nocontext and its derivatives are dedicated to images or comments like this.
  • I Was Quite a Fashion Victim: /r/blunderyears, where users post embarrassing photos of their youth.
  • It Will Never Catch On: /r/RedditThroughHistory is mostly about this. Much of the humor in their 2012 April Fool's Day time-travel joke also relies on this.

    J to M 

    N to P 
  • Nausea Fuel: Invoked in The Swamps of Dagobah story describes an awful smelling pus-riddled woman being operated on by the person posting it.
  • Nature Is Not Nice: /r/natureismetal and /r/HardcoreNature focuses on the more brutal parts of nature (such as animal deaths and predator kills).
  • Newbie Boom: r/gatesopencomeonin/ invokes this. The subreddit describes itself as the antithesis of /r/gatekeeping, in that the former subreddit is about posts which are inclusionary or encourage people to try new things without feeling bad about it.invoked
  • Nightmare Fetishist: The denizens of /r/creepy and /r/nosleep.
  • Nightmare Retardant: invoked Invoked with /r/shittynosleep, a parody of /r/nosleep.
  • Non-Indicative Name:
    • The "SFW Porn" group of subreddits, which unanimously refer to "porn" in the Food Porn and Scenery Porn sense, i.e. pretty photos of food and landscapes. Gets especially awkward with /r/HumanPorn (which does occasionally have artful nudes) and /r/AnimalPorn. This often will annoy redditors, who may not appreciate having the word "porn" in their history, no matter its intended use, enough so that a catch-all sub called /r/NoSillySuffix was formed to avert the trope.
    • The Swamps of Dagobah post has nothing to do with Star Wars, and is in actuality a Squicky story.
    • /r/trees is about marijuana. /r/marijuanaenthusiasts, therefore, was the logical place to put the subreddit that was actually about trees.
    • r/worldpolitics became an NSFW subreddit in mid-2020, with r/anime_titties, the actual world politics subreddit, being formed in protest to the former descending into anarchy. The latter got its name for, well, Hentai being posted on the former sub.
    • /r/stormfront is about severe weather, not the notorious white supremacist forum. In a way a Subverted Trope, as it is, in fact, literally about storms.
      • Similarly, /r/white used to be about white supremacy until the current moderation petitioned to adopt it, whereupon they transformed it into a place for pictures of things that are shades of white.
    • Around four out of every five subreddits with "pussy" in their name will actually pertain to cats. r/girlswithhugepussies features pictures of girls holding large cats, while r/tightpussy features cats fit snugly in tight places, such as corners, boxes, and the like.
    • /r/OnlyFans was once about reposting NSFW content from the website of the same name, which led to it getting so many DMCA takedowns it had to be closed and stayed that way for two years. In August of 2020, the current moderator requested to adopt the sub and subsequently turned it into a sub for fans. As in, air circulation devices.
    • r/PeopleFuckingDying is a cute/wholesome content subreddit in the vein of r/aww or r/eyebleach. However, r/PeopleFuckingDying has posts with mockingly deceptive titles that suggest violent or gruesome content. For instance, a post titled "saDisTIc HoomAN makES DogS BatTLe For hIs aMuseMenT" is a video about a guy making two small puppies gently kiss each other, who then start playing together.
    • In general, subs named after a specific meme or original incident will be confusing to those outside of the loop, especially if their names look like something that makes sense at first glance. r/DisneyVacation, for example, is about re-contextualizing weird illustrations in WikiHow articles, not actual vacations to Disneyland or Disney World; for that would be /r/WaltDisneyWorld
      • r/DontDeadOpenInside has the meme they are named after permanently pinned to the top, otherwise you would have no idea what the sub is about. note 
      • r/LeopardsAteMyFace quotes a tweet from author Adrian Bott that gave their subreddit its name as the first part of the subreddit's description: "'I Never Thought Leopards Would Eat MY Face,' Sobs Woman Who Voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party". The subreddit is about the schadenfreude when someone is upset because they're suffering consequences from something they voted for, supported, or wanted to impose on other people. It has nothing to do with animal attacks or faces being eaten; the subreddit has explicit rules against those things.
    • You'd be forgiven for thinking /r/kappa is either something Twitch-related because of its namesake emote or about the mythological Kappa. Instead, it's a subreddit related to the Fighting Game Community with a side order of shitposting.
    • /r/potatosalad is about John Cena. Naturally, /r/johncena is about literal potato salad.
  • "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
    • /r/nottheonion collects real news articles that wouldn't look out of place on parody sites such as The Onion. The sidebar stresses that the sub is for true stories only.
    • /r/subsithoughtifellfor/ chronicles subreddit names that sound fake, but are actually entirely real. Similarly, /r/subsiwishifellfor/ are for documenting subreddit links that are genuine, but are otherwise unwise to visit.
  • Not Me This Time: Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao was already disliked by some redditors for removing some subreddits among other actions. When a well-liked admin was let go unexpectedly, Reddit freaked out on Pao, only for it to be revealed later that it was actually /u/kn0thing that had fired the admin.
  • Not the Intended Use: After the website decided to greatly expand its award system to include more fun awards, people started to misuse them. The most infamous is using the "wholesome" award to express aproval of things that are in no way wholesome.
  • Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Those who fit the stereotype are mocked on /r/FuckYouKaren, which originated as a series of memes about an obnoxious ex-wife and is now dedicated to memes about the entitled, argumentative suburban mom stereotype.
  • Offscreen Inertia: Commonly used in /r/thisismylifenow, which is a subreddit dedicated gifs or pics of people and animals accepting their uncommon situations. One of the top posts is a woman who just got new glasses having to deal with the fact that they fog up whenever she tries to drink coffee.
  • Only in Florida: The subreddit /r/floridaman examines various bizarre stories coming out of Florida.
  • Original Position Fallacy: /r/LeopardsAteMyFace, named for a tweet from author Adrian Bott: "'I Never Thought Leopards Would Eat MY Face,' Sobs Woman Who Voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party". The subreddit is all about headlines showcasing people who rally for something, only to see this decision backfire when the consequences of what they rallied for start being applied to them. For instance, a frequent source of humor on the subreddit is people who voted for a political policy without thinking through the full implications of it eventually finding that the policy also applies to them, and suffering consequences for it.
  • Orphaned Punchline: Take Simon's Cat, strip out the buildup and convert it to a gif, and see the result. The "switcharoo" meme is all about jokes that apparently are related to the subject matter at hand, but are often something about something else.
  • Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Many of the posts on /r/atheism involve variations of this sentiment being expressed. /r/magicskyfairy is a mockery of such by deliberately taking the terminology antitheists and /r/atheism use a lot (magic invisible sky fairies that don't exist, fundies, etc) and upping it to eleven.
  • Overly Long Gag:
    • Pun threads and "No, you're thinking of __" threads tend to devolve into these.
    • Comment chains, sometimes stretching on into the hundreds or thousands long, are pretty common on the site. Expect any instance of "Nice" or "F" to have at least ten people after it comment the exact same thing.
  • Palette Swap: /r/reallifeshinies, named after "shinies" from Pokémon, collects pictures of animals and objects that have a different color scheme than usual.
  • Papa Wolf: /r/dadreflexes features fathers saving their young children from imminent danger.
  • Pass the Popcorn: The logo for /r/subredditdrama, which, as the name suggests, records the various instances of flamewars on the site. Popcorn is also frequently mentioned in the posts. Popcorn flair is available in /r/politics.
  • The Peeping Tom: In a major scandal (crassly dubbed "the Fappening") where many celebrities' private nude photos were illegally copied from their phones, Reddit promptly became a hub for people distributing the leaked images. The offending subreddits were eventually shut down by the site admins, amid much controversy - but not before they'd reached critical mass, with the material spread so much as to have become trivial to find with a Google search.
  • The Points Mean Nothing: Often said about the "karma" points users collect from upvotes, and yet users still fight over them. Given new life when Reddit went apeshit over staff decision to remove the ability to see the exact number of upvotes and downvotes, and users with hundreds of thousands of link karma attract hate comments every so often. And, of course, the tagline for /r/scenesfromahat.
  • Poke the Poodle:
    • The entire point of /r/firstworldanarchists.
    • /r/madlads is similar, consisting of posts made on social media with the perpetrator worried, ashamed, proud, or otherwise putting more weight on their offense than it calls for.
  • Poe's Law:
    • /r/atetheonion features examples of people mistaking articles from the satirical "news"paper The Onion for actual news articles. Conversely, /r/nottheonion is for legitimate news articles with subject matter so weird that it can be mistaken for an article from The Onion.
    • The initial reaction to /r/pyongyang is generally confusion over whether it's serious or not. On the one hand, the idea of a bastion of English-language pro-North Korea propaganda on one of the most mainstream American sites is preposterous. On the other hand, they're very dedicated to the charade, and a number of far-left subreddits express unironic support for North Korea.
    • In its heyday, /r/The_Donald often got this reaction from those outside of it, especially since it became so popular, the subreddit appeared on the front page numerous times. Based on the sheer amount of fanaticism its users had for Donald Trump, many users were unsure exactly how much of it is a joke.
    • Political subreddits in general have been known to take sarcastic statements or parodies of their opponents as if they were genuine statements.
  • Pokémon Speak: /r/CatsStandingUp only allows users to post "Cat." and nothing else. If anything else is posted, the user is banned.
  • Police Are Useless:
    • It's well-documented that Reddit has almost no respect towards police officers, mainly due to Accentuate the Negative articles painting cops as useless, prone to Police Brutality, painting them as Dirty Cops or consistent Karma Houdinis.
    • Occasionally subverted when a police officer does an AMA; what usually happens is that curiosity prevails and a lot of genuine questions are asked, often followed by newfound respect after it becomes clear that while there certainly are crooked cops, the average officer's job is not about whacking random people over the head with truncheons.
  • Police Brutality: One of the reasons Reddit hates cops, as noted above. /r/bad_cop_no_donut is dedicated to instances where cops overstep their boundaries.
  • Precision F-Strike: Prolific novelty account u/Poem_for_your_sprog leaves comments in the form of poems, several of which are about an unfortunate person named Timmy and end with "And Timmy fucking died."
  • Pretender Diss:
    • /r/gatekeeping collects attempts at these that come off as being pointlessly exclusionary instead.
    • On the other side. r/AsABlackMan is dedicated to exposing and mocking people who pretend to be Boomerang Bigots in order to undermine marginalized groups.
  • The Problem with Pen Island: Some subreddit titles will use this as a Bait-and-Switch. Most noteworthy is /r/superbowl, which at first looks like it may be referring to the championship game in the NFL, but is actually in fact a subreddit full of owls of the superb variety.
  • Punctuation Changes the Meaning: There's a bot that takes cues from the xkcd comic by automatically searching for phrases with "[descriptor] ass [thing]" in posts and replying to them with the same phrase but with a hyphen placed after "ass" so it reads, "[descriptor] ass-[thing]".

    Q to T 
  • Rank Inflation: /r/trees has a number scale to indicate how high the poster is. The problem is that unlike 420chan's number scale, it's subjective (i.e. [10] is the highest the poster has ever been, as opposed to adhering to certain objective symptoms). The /r/trees FAQ acknowledges that most [10] posts are exaggerations. Some posters have suggested [11] or similar to actually refer to being that ridiculously high, but they are quickly shot down.
  • A Rare Sentence: r/BrandNewSentence. Also /r/RareInsults.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Real Life: /r/outside is Reddit's equivalent to our page on the subject.
  • Rice Burner: r/Shitty_Car_Mods, which features a lot of extremely impractical car mods.
  • Rouge Angles of Satin: r/BoneAppleTea is a subreddit that chronicles examples of this.
  • Running Gag:
    • There is no The Last Airbender movie. Anyone who mentions one will be invariably met with replies of "What movie?" Other movies have since gotten this treatment, such as X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Ghostbusters (2016). Some take the gag further by replying "There is no war in Ba Sing Se."
    • "Are you that guy from the Warlizard gaming forum?" whenever /u/Warlizard comments. Warlizard will usually reply with "ಠ_ಠ"
    • "GODDAMIT VARGAS"
    • It went okay.
    • You have been banned from /r/pyongyang.
      • You have been made a moderator of /r/pyongyang.
      • You have been banned from /r/pingpong.
    • x/10 with rice. Thank you for your suggestion. Reference to this thread.
    • Any minor twist in a story will be met with "Directed by M. Night Shyamalan".
    • "Test something Please Ignore" is given to anything created by redditors, whether it's a Minecraft modpack, an EVE Online alliance, or a political action committee. It's based off of a test post, which somehow became the most popular post on the site.
    • Then my dad beat me up with jumper cables.
    • u/Poem_for_your_sprog is a novelty account who leaves comments in the form of poems, many of which are about an unfortunate character named Timmy that always end with "...and Timmy fucking died".
    • Learning Uzbek in the language learning subreddit.
    • I also choose this guy's dead wife.
    • Running gags and other inside jokes have in fact been a popular feature of Reddit culture since as far back as nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.
  • Sarcastic Confession: This treecomic and its comments.
  • Scenery Gorn: /r/DestructionPorn and /r/ApocalypsePorn. And, of course, a sizable part of the Imaginary Network, like /r/ImaginaryDerelicts and /r/ImaginaryWastelands.
  • Scenery Porn: Most of the "SFW Porn" subreddits, such as /r/EarthPorn, /r/CityPorn, /r/SpacePorn, and /r/waterporn, are dedicated to this. The Imaginary Network is mostly divided between Technology Porn (see the example below), Scenery Gorn (see the example above), and this, with subreddits such as /r/ImaginaryCityscapes, /r/ImaginarySkyscapes or /r/ImaginaryForests
  • The Schizophrenia Conspiracy: r/gangstalking is notorious as a gathering place for paranoid schizophrenics and other people with paranoid or persecutory delusions and has occasionally been the target of ban petitions due to its status as an echo tank for seriously unwell people, but has so far managed to avoid that fate. r/legaladvice also sees this from time to time with some of the stalking and harassment claims, but individuals who go there are almost always implored to get help and are often provided with mental health resources.
  • Screen Shake: /r/redditintensifies
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: This post caused at least 30 accounts so far to delete themselves after announcing they would leave reddit forever. Also encompassed in r/JustUnsubbed, where posters share the last straw of the subreddit they once followed.
  • Self-Deprecation: Very common among posters, especially in /r/suicidebywords, a subreddit dedicated to self-deprecating humor. r/KamikazeByWords too, which mixes in a Take That! at the poster's target.
  • Self-Parody: There are entire Reddit communities based around mocking Reddit, most notably /r/circlejerk. Unfortunately, this often escalates into bullying.
  • Sequential Boss: The concept is parodied with /r/2healthbars — its content encompasses anything, even mundane oddities, that invokes the feeling of taking out a boss's health only for it to reveal its second form (and health bar).
  • Serial Escalation: When one user posts a certain image, some others decide to post a new image trying to either one-up the previous one, or add [Fixed] to the replacement image. By the time a random reader notices, it's the sixth time they've created a new escalation for a theme, and they've become increasingly efficient about it.
  • Serious Business:
    • Karma points. Dear Lord. "Power users" with extremely high karma tend to attract a hatedom just for having high karma.
    • Subreddit sidebar rules.
    • Frivolous rules aren't exempt. For example: in /r/thingsforants you are to title every post "What is this, a <whatever> for ants??". Any deviation - like failing to include "what is this" at the beginning - will have members calling for the offender's ban.
    • /r/CatsStandingUp takes this trope to its Logical Extreme... Played for Laughs. Every title and comment must be exactly "Cat.". The CSS on the page even changes the usernames and subreddit tabs to "Cat.".
    • The Throwdown Thursday threads in /r/Nintendo have a hard-and-fast rule that every comment must be written in all-caps. These are common to other video game or sports subreddits who similarly have weekly shouting threads to vent/rage/circlejerk.
    • /r/KarmaCourt parodies the concept by providing a place where users can make cases regarding unfair distribution of karma.
    • /r/MemeEconomy is another parody. Investors advise and ask questions to other investors about the future value of memes, what to buy, what to sell, etc, with some users claiming to fall into depression after losing their fortune investing into a failed meme.
    • /r/anime's annual "Best Girl Contests". Expect essays, video tributes, and entire photo albums devoted to someone's "waifu". The subreddit has many other contests, but the Best Girl contest dwarfs all of them, even the Best Character Contest (which includes male characters in addition to the females).
    • /r/ShingekiNoKyojin, also known as Attack on Titan in the west, treats untagged spoilers as very serious business, given the reveal-heavy nature of the story.
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: "Tree fiddy stories", via Memetic Mutation from South Park, where someone posts a long and ostensibly on-topic story, which ends up in a character asking for "about tree fiddy" and revealing himself to be a disguised Loch Ness monster.
  • Shoddy Knockoff Product: /r/crappyoffbrands and its parody, /r/shittyoffbrands, have examples of these from around the world.
  • The Singularity: /r/Singularity, of course.
  • Sophisticated as Hell: Prolific novelty account /u/Poem_for_your_sprog tends to reply to comments with a well-crafted, sometimes eloquent poem... that frequently end with a single, abrupt curse in the final line. Nearly any poem about a hypothetical "Timmy" is inevitably going to end with "And Timmy fucking died."
  • So Unfunny, It's Funny: /r/ComedyCemetery collects text, comics, and videos of this nature. For truly hilariously unfunny material, there's /r/ComedyHeaven. Then there's /r/ComedyNecrophilia where people try to do this intentionally.
  • Speaks in Shout-Outs:
    • In general, any fandom subreddit is going to have newcomers out of the loop if they don't know what the shoutouts refer to.
    • The /r/unexpected line of subreddits, such as /r/UnexpectedTF2 and /r/UnexpectedB99 which often has users post screnshots of an unrelated topic being taken over by a shoutout of a particular show/ game/ movie reference.
  • Spiritual Successor: Reddit can be seen as one to Usenet, especially its alt.* hierarchy.
  • Spoiled Brat: Among the worst case scenarios for an /r/entitledparents story, with parents refusing to admit their baaabyyy did something wrong or, even worse, actively encouraging the kid to do something wrong. Or trying to steal other people's belongings.
  • Spoiler Title: Subs in the NoNoYesYes family indicate how their gifs are going to go down ahead of time just by virtue of the nature of the subreddit's content. r/nonononoyes is when someone almost fails but succeeds, and r/yesyesyesyesno/ is when someone almost succeeds but fails. Defied by the /r/MaybeMaybeMaybe subreddit, which can start or end in any direction without the subreddit name spoiling.
  • So Bad, It's Good: Invoked on a lot of subreddits.
    • Most subs starting with "shitty" are dedicated to collecting particularly poor examples of something, though some of them, such as /r/shittylifeprotips, are deliberate attempts at it.
    • /r/justfuckmyshitup collects really strange hairstyles, some of which would require a great deal of effort to create and maintain.
  • Spot the Thread: Reddit being what it is, the veracity of a decent amount of the stories and responses posted should be taken with a grain of salt, unless the sub in question requires proof of real-life credentials. Sometimes, however, other users that know what they're talking about will notice a detail inconsistency that exposes the fake, e.g. incorrect medical/law terminology, military members displaying inadequate or wrong Acronym and Abbreviation Overload.
  • Start My Own: It doesn't take much to start a new subreddit, so sometimes you see disgruntled members of a community split off to form their own, without rules or members they disagree with.
    • Happened to the whole of Reddit, too, in the form of Voat and Ruqqus.
  • Stealth Parody: One interpretation of /r/shitredditsays is that its members talk about privileged people, namely Straight Able-bodied Cisgender White Males (SAWCASMs) the way they talk about minorities on Reddit.
  • Straw Fan: /r/salteirthankrayt is devoted to calling them out, with a particular focus on detractors of the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
  • Straw Feminist: A self-mocking, ironic Running Gag on the SRS "fempire", used to mock accusations of being radical feminists. Also used, unironically, by its detractors.
  • Straw Nihilist: /r/2meirl4meirl/ is a subreddit dedicated to mental health issues and self-deprecating humour. Many of the top posts are jokes about how badly someone is doing in life, how they struggle with depression, or how they feel worthless. As such, many of the posts and the comments are very self-defeating and fatalistic.
  • Stylistic Suck:
    • /r/crappydesign is self-demonstrating, with Comic Sans as the default font for all text elements, an ugly, nonsensical banner, the sub name in barely-readable rainbow WordArt, a rotating upvote arrow, and a a downvote arrow with 'TM' superimposed on it.
    • Some subreddits have taken to turning their subreddits as ugly as possible when viewed through the NP (no posting, which happens when you come to the Subreddit through a link from another subreddit - this is to prevent brigading) filter.
    • The design for /r/mildlyinfuriating includes a simulated slow-loading banner image, randomly tilted comment text, glaring typos, and lots of other things to help it live up to its name.
    • /r/ATBGE inverts this; the acronym stands for "Awful Taste But Great Execution". It's where someone's craftsmanship is ingenious or well-done, despite the fact that what they were doing still doesn't look very good or is clearly a bad idea.
  • Take That!: r/MurderedByWords, which is where someone makes a snappy comeback. r/KamikazeByWords too, mixed with some Self-Deprecation.
  • Talkative Loon:
  • Tall Poppy Syndrome: Users with high karma get hate just for having high karma.
    • Post that do well enough will be added to /r/all, where they will get the most exposure of any posts on the site. It also means they will be seen by people outside the community it was posted in and who have little fear of moderator repercussions. The creators of such content are often "honored" with thousands of messages of hate and criticism.
  • Technology Porn: /r/MachinePorn and /r/GeekPorn. r/hardwaregore is Technology Gorn. A lot of the Imaginary Network qualifies as well - like /r/ImaginaryStarships and /r/ImaginaryRobots.
  • Tempting Fate:
    • If somebody posts "do not upvote" in terms of hiding an awkward question or post, people will probably upvote the hell out of it anyway.
    • Various r/HermanCainAward/ "recipients" have downplayed the severity of the COVID-19 Pandemic, only to find themselves fighting for their lives - and eventually losing - against the virus.
  • Theme Naming: Subreddits with "shitty" in their name (such as /r/shittynosleep, /r/shittyaskscience, or /r/shittyama) are humorous parodies of their respective "legit" subreddits, while those with "circlejerk" are parodies of the community associated with them. Note that there are exceptions - for example /r/shittykickstarters is a (relatively) serious subreddit dedicated to debunking and exposing crowdfunding scams.
  • The Stoner: /r/trees is the most popular marijuana subreddit. (If you actually want to talk about trees, go to /r/marijuanaenthusiasts.)
  • There Are No Girls on the Internet: At one point 86.7% of the site was male. Nowadays it's closer to 67%-69% but it's still a clear majority. The Subreddit of TwoXChromosomes aims to avert this, and ShitRedditSays has a healthy female userbase.
  • Time Dissonance: Played for Horror in the r/nosleep post If you're armed and at the Glenmont Metro, please shoot me. The narrator participates in a clinical trial for a drug that accelerates his brain functions, causing him to perceive time more slowly. At first, the downsides are only annoying and boring, with minutes feeling like hours and his 30-minute ride home feeling like days. As time goes on and the effects of the drug keep intensifying, to the point that turning the pages of a book takes longer than reading it and he can see the individual frames on TV, boredom gets the better of him he eventually decides to take an Ambien to try and sleep the effects off. The sleeping pill interacts with the drug and begins severely magnifying its effects, hitting him right as he was running down the stairs at the metro station, causing him to lose his footing from the sudden change and get locked into a fall down the steps that, from his perspective, takes days. The impact dislocates his shoulder and he discovers, while his senses are slowed down, the pain never subsides because his body is still working in real-time, and he decides it's too much and tries to throw himself onto the tracks. His perception of time eventually slows to the point that simply blinking plunges him into darkness for centuries. After enduring what feels like thousands of years of pain and boredom over the course of a few minutes, he posts online, begging for someone to put him out of his misery. A shot to the temple should only take a few decades.
  • Title Drop: Some r/LetsNotMeet stories end with the writer telling the person they encountered a variation of "let's not meet". The content guidelines for the subreddit point this out, emphasising that this isn't required.
  • Trademark Favorite Food: Bacon, Nutella. In a more condescending stereotype, Doritos/Cheetos and Mountain Dew, usually to mock game journalists, after an infamous interview from Gamespot where an absolutely miserable-looking journalist conducted a piece with Mountain Dew and Doritos prominently placed in the vid.
  • Totally Radical: /r/FellowKids categorizes various advertisements that try (and fail) to use slang in order to appeal to a younger demographic, but which just come across as embarrassing due to the slang being used incorrectly. This is especially true when the ads try (and fail) to incorporate memes.
  • Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket: /r/wheredidthesodago is dedicated to out-of-context infomercial scenes, most of which come in this form.
  • Torches and Pitchforks: /r/PitchforkEmporium is dedicated to manufacturing and selling ASCII pitchforks for riots, paid in shmeckles.
  • Transhuman: /r/Transhuman and /r/Transhumanism. And, occasionally, /r/Singularity.
  • Troll: Many subreddits are full of these. It's usually best to assume that "I Am A" and "Ask Me Anything" posts are fake until proven otherwise; as you can imagine the idea is such a lure for trolls.
  • Trust Password: IamA and AMA posters are encouraged to verify their authenticity by submitting photos with a timestamp.

    U to Z 
  • Unknown Rival:
    • Most of 4chan deeply despises Reddit, to the point where they've made hundreds of fake versions of Reddit's rage comics to troll themselves with. However, the hatred is generally one-sided with a few subreddits dedicated to documenting 4chan such as /r/4chan and /r/classic4chan, and they're ambivalent at worst. Something Awful hates Reddit for the same reason, on top of all the misogynistic, anti-theist, pedophilic, and creepy (not in the 'horror genre' sense) subreddits. They organized a giant raid to force Reddit's admins to shut down all the child porn subreddits.
    • Reddit has one of these with 9gag, Reddit having an entire sub-reddit devoted to complaining about 9gag, while most members of 9gag aren't even aware of that Reddit dislikes them and a fair few are very likely unaware that Reddit even exists.
    • Reddit has had a long-standing feud with Gawker, which boiled over in the violentacrez debacle.
    • A chunk of Redditors hate Imgur for some bizarre reason, despite a healthy shared userbase due to Imgur being the primary go-to for Reddit uploads. It goes the other way as well. /r/IgnorantImgur is a subreddit for this.
    • There have been many Reddit clones and offshoots made by people disgruntled about decisions that Reddit has made. Most of these offshoots are very small.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Name: Subverted with many well-known power users who often have usernames like ANAL_QUEEN or other sexual/disgusting phrase written in all caps.
    • There's also a trend for "PM_ME_YOUR_[insert thing here in all-caps]" usernames, which can get quite odd very quickly. Even better if the thing the username is requesting can be interpreted either sexually, or innocently.
  • Viewers Are Geniuses: Some of the jokes on /r/fifthworldproblems are more esoteric than anything on xkcd.
  • Vigilante Man: Those involving themselves in the events surrounding the now-private subreddit /r/findbostonbombers, where the subreddit attempted to identify and locate the culprits behind the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013. It's become a Once Done, Never Forgotten subject among longtime users of Reddit, as the subreddit pointed the finger at the wrong person.
  • Virtual Paper Doll: Redditors can create their own Snoo avatar by opening up the avatar maker from their profile and customizing Snoo's face, pants, shirt, head and hair, and skin color.
  • Waxing Lyrical: Happens occasionally, with different redditors going line by line. Chronicled by /r/redditsings.
  • The Walrus Was Paul: /r/gggg, which was originally only Morse code messages, with lower case being .'s and upper case being dashes.
  • What a Piece of Junk: r/sleeperbattlestations is dedicated to powerful PCs that utilize old or unassuming cases.
  • What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: /r/whatcouldgowrong fits this to a tee.
  • Wicked Wasps: r/fuckwasps is an entire community dedicated to people who find wasps evil and despicable. Posts in the community frequently contain images and videos of people trapping and/or killing wasps.
  • Wise Beyond Their Years: /r/wokekids is a sub dedicated to posting about kids and babies making "profound" statements, spouting conspiracy theories, or having intellect beyond most adults. /r/thathappened also commonly chronicles obviously fake or heavily embellished versions of this.
  • Wiki Walk: It is considered slightly bad form to post a link to TV Tropes in a comment thread. Not that anyone there doesn't like us; just that once they get here they'll be stuck for the rest of the day - although it's arguable they already had this problem by being on Reddit in the first place.
  • Your Mom: If there's an opportunity to make a joke like that at OP's expense, someone will take it.
  • Really 700 Years Old: /r/13or30 asks redditors to work out of the inage posted is the person at 13 years old or 30 years old.
  • Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: The entire point of r/KidsAreFuckingStupid is to showcase hilarious examples of this.
  • Zeerust: /r/RetroFuturism

load more tropes

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top