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Over the last few years, R/AmItheAsshole (AITA) — Reddit’s one-stop clearinghouse for internet drama, comeuppances, and popcorn gallery judgments on the behavior of strangers — has ascended rapidly from niche forum to mainstream forum to omnipresent cultural juggernaut.

The subreddit, as Reddit’s topic-based forums are known, boasts 20 million members ready to decide who’s right in a given situation and who’s wrong.

The stories are typically both specific and archetypal: There’s the bride feeling upstaged on her wedding day, the woman whose husband insists on bringing his sister with them on their honeymoon, the airline passenger who wonders if she should have given up her first-class seat for a stranger’s child.

AITA has prompted numerous spinoffs — not just advice subreddits and confessional subreddits that get at the same yen for revelation and judgment, but subreddits devoted to filtering only the best (or worst) stories. 

This Reddit sprawl has spilled over outside of the platform, spawning a whole internet AITA ecosystem. TikTok is full of automated accounts that read stories from AITA in monotone against weirdly hypnotic footage of games. Twitter and Instagram are replete with screenshots of Reddit stories, while dozens of audio podcasters and YouTubers have sprung up to retell and comment on the latest scandalous post.

The ecosystem has also spawned endless merch, from coffee mugs to children’s book parodies to self-help journals. 

What is it about these endlessly tawdry tales that have us so addicted? 

For one, AITA built on the promise of previous advice subreddits by streamlining the comment section debates into a simple, clean voting system that cut down on lots of needless arguing and got to the point: Were you the asshole or not?

As a cultural phenomenon, the impact of AITA, which was created in 2013, has been wide-ranging: It’s been the subject of philosophical and demographic study; it’s been credited with helping people leave their own toxic and unhealthy relationships. The dynamics of the forum have even drawn their own obsessive scrutiny. 

The recent gossip trend aligns perfectly with AITA’s rise in popularity. AITA, however, is meta-gossip: gossip that’s not about a person we know, not about a famous person, and quite frequently not even about a real person. It is gossip in the abstract — gossip about the idea of a person and about human nature. 

Often the sagas take up multiple posts, spawning entire mini-arcs across the website as what began as a single story becomes an ongoing narrative. Such updates can be piecemeal, incomplete, and scattered across the forum, a user’s profile, or the comments. It can take work to even find them, much less curate them.

It’s no wonder, then, that, increasingly, audiences of this type of melodramatic content are turning to sources outside Reddit to get it. 

Dustin Storm, a.k.a. YouTuber and podcaster Dusty Thunder, says he was “never a Reddit head.” It was his wife and daughter who loved the site’s stories. Now, Storm reads them on his podcast. In order to react authentically to the stories as he reads them on air, Storm actively avoids the Reddit advice subs so he won’t get spoiled.

The formula has paid off; since he started his show in 2022, his audience has topped 30,000 subscribers on YouTube and nearly a million TikTok followers. 

“It's a different kind of entertainment,” he said. “Instead of tuning into Grey’s Anatomy, now they’re jumping on and listening to some of the crazy stories that have been going on Reddit, and it’s just a completely different form of content that people have latched onto.”

Many of the off-platform content creators trawl the meta forums because they have serialized stories and a sense (sometimes) of resolution. Their appeal makes sense; not only are Redditors churning out a bottomless well of free content for podcasters and other creators to curate, but the stories themselves reside in that irresistible space between the real and the fictional: just believable enough to seem plausible, but escalated enough to feel like pure escapism. 

Of course, there’s no way to fact-check the veracity of these Reddit stories. You might think that the growing influx of stories that seem to be total fakes would make them less appealing to readers, but the opposite seems to be true. 

"For us, it’s entertainment, number one. And number two, it’s an exercise in being able to make better decisions and relationships,” Storm said. “And if it serves that purpose, I give zero shits if it’s real or fake.” 

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Should parents be held responsible for school shootings? Colin Gray, the father of alleged Apalachee High School shooter Colt Gray, has been arrested on charges including two counts of second-degree murder. Gray allegedly gifted his son an AR-15-style rifle, despite knowledge he was a threat to himself and others.

Beyoncé snubbed: While other pop crossover artists including Post Malone made the cut this year, Beyonce received zero nominations for the Country Music Awards despite the historic, chart-topping album Cowboy Carter. And this isn’t the first time the singer has clashed with the award show. The backlash to her 2016 CMA performance may have fueled some of her inspiration for the project.

I couldn’t help but wonder… What would it be like if Carrie Bradshaw had Tiktok? Online content creators are providing viewers with a real-life glimpse at their dating lives, chronicling the ups and downs in dating diary-style vlogs with juicy details for their dedicated viewers.

Everybody’s a cynic: It might feel like negativity is a reasonable response to the state of the world, but there are many reasons that outlook is counterintuitive.  Psychologist Jamil Zaki explains why cynicism can be destructive to individuals and societies, and how to prevent sinking further into your own skepticism.

Why we can’t kick our Kennedy fixation: Americans have a parasocial relationship with the Kennedys, who are the closest thing they have to a royal family. If you’re wondering  why Jack Schlossberg, RFK Jr., and Kick Kennedy are captivating the media lately, here’s an interview with a “Kennedy expert.”

The end of the e-cigarette era? According to the Youth Tobacco Survey, less than 6 percent of kids now vape, a decline of 70 percent from 2019, when usage was at its peak. Crackdowns on e-cigarette supply chains and counter-marketing have made a significant impact on curbing youth use, but the tobacco industry is targeting teens with new products as a result. [NPR]

How the sleep-curious become sleepmaxxers: Sleep is a multibillion-dollar industry. As health-related interest in sleep has grown, many are turning to trackers, pillow mists, mouth tape, and other forms of “sleep tech” in pursuit of the perfect night’s rest.  [New York Times]

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Famously, the quality of the stuff we buy has largely been getting worse. Complaining about it is one thing. Finding solutions is another.

I've been obsessed with the idea of what it would take to create a system where buying something doesn't mean that item would end up in a landfill months or even years from now.

How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by materials scientist Deb Chachra is a book mostly about making better energy and transportation systems, but there's also a little bit about the challenge of recycling certain materials. You've probably heard that some plastics or textiles aren't recyclable. And that's true — but it doesn't mean that our current buy-toss-repeat cycle is set in stone.

Her book informed me on the possibilities of abundance and what it would take to build a future where recycling is taken to a whole other level. Although my latest piece is more focused on the fashion waste problem, Chachra's work helped shift my mindset.

—Izzie Ramirez, Future Perfect deputy editor

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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