If reactions are any indication, yesterday’s no pics day on Reddit was a big flop.
A number of subforums across the site participated, including popular sections r/funny and F7U12, the user-made comics forum. The goal was to increase the number of thoughtful posts on the site, which have trouble sticking out amongst a flood of image submissions.
Text posts — mostly image macro jokes — dominated the front page of r/funny yesterday (the day before, the top ten posts were all images).
But many redditors didn’t appreciate the experiment.
One of the top voted submissions on r/funny was an animated gif with the title “Dear no pics day.” The image showed actor Cillian Murphy smugly showing two middle fingers — the British gesture, although adding another digit, means exactly the same as its familiar American cousin.
And one of the top-voted posts on the site’s homepage, as of this morning, was an image titled “Never Forget.” The image itself is just text, with the words “July 6, 2011: The least funny day in the history of Reddit.”
“The only problem was how forgettable it was,” wrote malcolmwhy, in that post’s top voted comment.
On F7U12, a subreddit devoted specifically to images, moderators did not officially announce the event until just hours before.
The moderators claimed they were just purposefully annoying their readers — for fun. They called it “chaos day.” Readers were not amused.
“Self post day is fucking stupid, and the mods are retards,” wrote redditor ChaosMotor in the title of a post that received 3,462 upvotes and 451 comments.
“I agree,” wrote JRowe3388, in that post’s top-voted comment. “A subreddit dedicated to posting rage comics disallowing images is pretty dumb.”
ChaosMotor eventually went so far as to suggest full-scale mutiny — the creation of a new rage comics subreddit “where the moderators act like janitors, and not petty little pissant tyrants who actively alienate the community then pretend they were ‘trolling’ and they ‘meant to’?”
That idea didn’t gain much traction, however.
At least some redditors enjoyed no pics day.
“I actually laughed more today than any other day,” wrote pandemic1444 in the “Never Forget” post. “I like the worded jokes.”
“I don’t know why everyone else was so vehemently opposed to this,” added cojafoji in the same post. “I haven’t laughed, groaned, or knee slapped this hard in a while.
Redditor Blackstar9000 originally proposed the idea for no pics day.
The poster suggested that Reddit was becoming saturated with images because of how fast users can view and vote for them.
“There are so many pics being submitted so quickly that it’s difficult for other kinds of submission to get around them,” Blackstar9000 wrote in the post announcing no pics day.
So was there any lingering signficance of the one-day event?
Not if Reddit’s front page is any indication.
As of this morning, seven of the top 10 posts were images.