If there’s anything redditors enjoy more than inside jokes and memes, it’s complaining about redditors who can’t get enough of inside jokes and memes.
That was the unfortunate reality redditor thebdp discovered over the weekend. He posted a video called Ode to Reddit, a cartoon mash-up based on the song “My Favorite Things” from the movie, The Sound of Music. It was chock-full of reddit insider references — narwhals, bacon, upvotes, etc. — all sung by animated rage faces.
Redditors upvoted the video straight to the top of the 600,000-strong r/videos section. But the ones who upvoted weren’t the ones who were commenting.
“Wow, you’ve just made me realise how fucking stupid all this stuff is. Why am I even here?” wrote one redditor, who apparently deleted his or her account immediately after. That comment was upvoted close to the top of the thread.
Wrote another in a popular comment: “This was maybe the worst thing I’ve ever seen on reddit and just showed me that calling yourself a “redditor” is among the most embarrassing things you can do on the internet”
In fact, most of the top-voted comments were complaints about the video.
Maybe everyone who disliked the video leaped into the comments section to discuss their displeasure. But, if that were the case, the same phenomenon would happen more frequently elsewhere.
But, really, redditors’ dueling love and hatred for the video is a perfect microcosm of the cultural conflict at the heart of the site right now. For every redditor who loves self-referential inside jokes, another despises them.
The problem wasn’t with the animation, or the singing — it was the fact that it existed at all. Why make a song about a website? As Redditor ZimbuTheMonkey wrote:
It’s just a website. I don’t understand why people get so gung-ho about reddit.Your video is cool and obviously you put a lot of effort into it. But I feel like you just devoted all this time to elevating and promoting something so lame and self-involved. Reddit is all about reddit. And that’s the worst part about the site.