


Today, that number rarely escapes the single digits. One moderator, who’s been around the subreddit since its heyday but asks to stay anonymous, sheepishly shared with me a spreadsheet from 2014, in which the team logged over 1,000 total “mod actions” in a month.
MAKING RAGE COMICS MOD
The mod team reports a few posts per week, the majority of which are reposts from rage comics that were drawn up six or seven years ago, but there’s the occasional scrap of original content that filters through the front door every blue moon. The inscription enshrined in the sidebar sums up the fruits of their labor nicely: “It’s still alive! Kinda…” The front page of r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu, taken on July 30, 2019. The subreddit will never resemble its former glory, but at the very least, it serves as a decent, well-curated tomb. Together, they purged the trolls and returned r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu to its intended state a place to post rage comics without a shred of irony. When they obliged, and he became a moderator, he went ahead and modded me.” “I got in contact with him, and then eventually in contact with Reddit officials requesting to give him modship. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but he’d express a desire to bring back law and order to the subreddit,” remembers Chase, when I interview him over Discord. “Upon discovering what was left of my favorite subreddit - decrepit, defunct, rampant with trolls - I stumbled upon a user in the comments sections of various posts. Chase spent most of his middle school years laughing at rage comics, so it was heartbreaking to find the subreddit left for dead, a feeding ground for those who’d wish to tarnish its memory. The front page was turned into a wasteland of low-effort posts, often completely unrelated to the titular comic format, each equipped with comment sections stuffed with juvenile bickering. As rage comics had slowly dissipated from internet culture, a roving band of shitposters had moved in to squat on the bones of a dead meme. That puts it above r/halo, r/doctorwho, r/adventuretime, and dozens of other vibrant fan communities on the site.īut when Chase, an 18-year-old from the Midwest, returned to the subreddit last year, he found it in disarray. The epicenter for rage comics, one of the defining fixtures of Reddit’s native language, stands tall with 852,000 members. By sheer numbers, r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu will always be one of the most populated forums on the internet.
