Inside R/Relationships, the Unbearably Human Corner of Reddit
“I cheated on my ex during our relationship and she found out shortly after we broke up,” a Reddit user posting from the burner account Khaleesiscorned wrote in the spring of 2016 in the subreddit r/relationships. “She’s blocked me on everything, but briefly unblocks me every Monday to send me Game of Thrones spoilers before I can watch. How do I get her to stop?”
The full story involves a number of details that are not particularly redeeming: The original poster actually cheated multiple times; some of his friends joined the ex in her cause because they no longer wanted to be associated with him and in fact actively disliked him; at no point did the poster acknowledge that this woman is obviously very funny! The post was eventually removed by the subreddit’s moderators as potentially fake, but not before a screenshot of it went viral on Twitter and dozens of outlets circulated the story with headlines like “Girl Gets Sweet, Fiery Revenge on Ex With ‘Game of Thrones’ Spoilers.”
“I think I expected a bit of advice?” he said when interviewed by New York magazine, incredulous, or pretending to be. “I’ve no idea why it was shut down.”
There are more than 1 million subreddits on Reddit, though the number of active communities is somewhere around 140,000. With more than 2.6 million members, r/relationships is currently number 74 on the site by size—a little less popular than basketball, a little more popular than tattoos. Last month, it recorded more than 40 million pageviews, and added an average of 1,516 new members each day.
This is a space to air your dirty laundry and request that perfect strangers tell you how to get the stains out. And as many different schools of thought as there are for red wine on silk, there are exponentially more for dealing with infidelity, dishonesty, poor personal hygiene, a partner who is perfectly kind in person but then tweets all his negative feelings about the relationship on a public Twitter account.
You can imagine the conversation spiraling out of control, but you rarely see it happen. That’s because of Anne, a pseudonymous 58-year-old woman who lives in California. She’s been leading the moderation team for r/relationships for close to a decade—long before mainstream publications started running roundups of the subreddit’s worst stories—and if you ask her, it’s not even that hard to maintain civil discourse and community. The big secret? Just delete stuff.
“We maintain [the community] by removing as much stuff as we remove,” she told me flatly in a phone call, stating what should be obvious to me.
Anne has been on the internet pretty much the whole time there’s been anything to do here,
