Post 1: The initial post
The initial post involves the OP criticizing the amount of actual (unironic) hate that the fantasy genre has engendered in r/bookscirclejerk.
One user claims that that's not what the comment said
The OP responds and clarifies what actually happen, only to be downvoted. Arguing ensues, with even a mod joins in.
In response to this, the OP makes another post making fun of the reading comprehension ability of the subreddit.
Post 2: The call-out
The comments mostly consist of people clowning on OP for caring in the first place, and doing pretty much the same thing as in the original post.
Some comments:
Despite the “no unjerking (ie being serious)” rule, pretty much everyone involved is serious.
The “no unjerking rule” genuinely ruins subreddits. I was permabanned for “unjerking” on that subreddit.
The worst part is that it’s not consistently enforced at all. If you’re being serious about whatever topic is being clowned on you won’t get banned, but if it’s the opposite you will be.
Its basically if the mods dislike your opinion they’ll permaban you.
Yeah, I unjerked like twice and a mod personally responded and told me that I was gonna get perma'd if I did it one more time, but did not tell that the person who I was talking to who was also uj, but disagreed with me. Blocked the mod and left the sub lol. It was so silly, because it's not like we were actually fighting, it was just a calm discussion where one of us disagreed.
Hell yeah
The first subreddit I remember seeing that rule in was r/GamersRiseUp which I think is pretty telling lol
Honestly circlejerk subreddits are all shit anyway, they did you a favor. Nothing lamer than someone who spends all their time complaining about something they ostensibly care about.
Worldjerking is fun.
Worldjerking and OkBuddyCinephile are some of my favorite subs on the site. I guess an OkBuddy sub and a circlejerk sub are slightly different in principle but they always end up very similar.
Worldjerking is the only circlejerk sub I keep around on my feed anymore. I used to frequent bookscirclejerk actually back when all the jokes were predominantly 1️⃣9️⃣8️⃣4️⃣ and Brandon Sanderson, but after a while things got a little too pretentious/mean and I had to dip out. Haven’t been back in a couple years.
I used to frequent Worldjerking, but then for a while it was over-run by completely unironic tankies and I lost all interest
r/artjerk is amazing
writingcirclejerk is also very fun
I interpret them as being absurd shitpost subs, poking (what should be) lighthearted fun at the fanbase and generally pretending to be an absolutely unhinged form of the community as a parody of how the subject and its forums are perceived
Like, I mod r/rollingstonescircjerk and I try to keep it as a surreal tapestry of lead-poisoned boomer nightmares come to life
You can feel free to do what you want and like what you want, so please take this as my personal opinion and not an attack.
Personally I think they’re communities based on complaining about having to hear common opinions. They’re communities based on negativity and looking down your noses at lesser people who are discovering what you love for the first time and making the same observations you did years ago.
I don’t really want to be a part of a community based on negativity. There’s maybe a little irony in that some people might think the same of this subreddit, but at least it’s not harping on the thing I love.
No offense taken, I do think you're generally right about them - I find them funny when they're literal nonsense parody, in the sense of the community poking fun at itself and saying absurd stuff for the hell of it, but it is true that most of it turns into mean bullying about people who dare to take the subject seriously on the main sub
Like, on mine, I never crosspost peoples' posts to make fun of them (unless I'm just riffing along with them), and most of the posts are just paranoid ramblings lol
EauDeJerks was fun before it just became all about hating that one reviewer called TLTG
You need a balance between jerks and unjerks for this exact reason - too much of one or the other causes the parody to read too similarly to the genuine comments and leads to the most tiresome arguments, and some level-headed honest discussion naturally rising out from the parody posts is good for the community because it keeps the whole thing on-topic and stops it from being a toxic hellhole of people who don't even care to understand the subject
Not true. Having a high unjerk culture also destroys subreddits. Basically, the thing which destroys subreddits is simply time and popularity.
It sounds rude, but it really is true that most people aren't that good at being funny on a consistent basis, so any circlejerk sub that gets too big fills with jokesters endlessly repeating the same unfunny lines (please god stop trying to be Batman Arkham everyone it's not funny anymore), and drowning out the original creative members who made the community good in the first place
You also see a weird phenomenon with online cliques, where a few of these people and their friends start imposing a weird social hierarchy on the board and make it unusable because it just becomes their hangout space full of people desperate for their approval, like an even sadder version of your average Discord server
Stop unjerking then bud. Rules are rules. People like you will swarm and ruin the sub if they aren't enforced
People unjerk all of the time on there and they don’t get banned.
It’s almost like “unjerking” has become synonymous with “saying something I don’t like”…
It absolutely is. I left the sub after an incident with someone where we were both unjerking, but only I was banned and had my posts deleted.
Irony poisoning is genuinely a thing that happens to a lot of places online, because if everyone's saying something stupid ironically, it's very hard to tell who's being stupid as a joke and who just genuinely holds those beliefs. And, after a while, does it even matter because you're saying the same shit either way. This is often how white supremacists traffic their views in online spaces, places like 4chan where loads of people "ironically" said bigoted shit welcomed them with open arms and and as people either grew tired of being called slurs, or just grew out of it; all that was left were the bigots and people who had no problem with pretending to be a bigot.
Like that sub that started out like "haha gamers are oppressed", then turned that joke into "haha it's probably the Jews oppressing us" as shock humor, but soon the actual antisemites turned up because they thought they were amongst their peers, and eventually the whole sub got banned when it became clear that the people that were still there were no longer joking.
Damn, I had forgotten about r/gamersriseup All those racist subs started to blend together over the years.
In a similar vein, like how people say joking about a fetish is a gateway drug to actually developing that fetish, joking about a belief is a gateway drug to actually developing that belief (or further extremizing it). Once I joined a jerk subreddit for a podcast that I liked cause I was a bit annoyed with the over the top praise I’d see on the main subreddit. Even though I left the subreddit after only a few days (cause whatever the original intentions for the subreddit were it was clear they were no longer being ironic and genuinely looked down on the podcast and its fans) after a while I had to stop listening to the podcast cause even though I thought most of their “criticisms” were ridiculous, reading their views towards the fans still made a small part of me feel I had something to be ashamed of and it actually ruined my ability to enjoy the podcast. Not saying everyone is as easily influenced as me, but jokes are a great way to slowly and subtlety influence others to adopt certain opinions.
Yup, it's the same mass-shaming mechanism on social media that leads people to fully reject any sense of being genuine or happy about anything in their lives - what if I'm cringe? It's so embarsssing to be happy and to like things without qualifying all my statements as jokes, because then someone might think that my personality is a joke!
(This isn't meant to be an attack on you at all btw, this is just the genuine mechanism behind it and it's really sad - believe me, I've been here a lot before too!)
I can’t remember who I first heard say it, but it reminds me of the idea that, if your satire fails, you just made more of the thing you hate. Like… good parody should properly convey the joke.
That being said, people will co-opt whatever they want if it’s useful to their ideology, and that’s an unfortunate risk you take on if you want to make satire. I think they call it Poe’s Law.
Irony poisoning almost instantly causes people to become genuinely cynical, miserable, and far too afraid to feel or express real joy about anything - it's like the world's most efficient generator of depression and rage
And like you say, it absolutely does lead to unironic beliefs! Psychologically, you can only repeat a "joke" so many times before you fully convince yourself that it's the truth on some deep level
I read WH40K literature.
I'm smart enough not to throw stones.
Ignace Karkasy did nothing wrong
U have any recs? I’ve never played but I love the lore
What faction are you interested in? Lot of books, lot of authors, lot of variety to find.
Gasp! Circlejerk sub fallen into it's own jerk! Never before seen!
Left that subreddit after they started calling Stephen King a pedophile in a way that was indistinguishable from a number of non-jerk subreddits, though honestly they were insufferable before then
Was that accusation based on the IT sex scene?
That and a tweet saying that the Epstein list wasn't real, which he immediately clarified meant that the existence of a list was just designed to rile up Trump's base
Saying that IT makes him a pedophile pisses me off just as badly, though - like, a not-insignificant part of why things are so shitty right now is because of this enormous puritan backslide you're seeing everywhere with everyone, and we're quickly erasing over a century of necessary, hard-fought liberation in the arts and mass media by saying that fictional creative works are Real Things that show the Deadly Sin in the author's soul, with no attempts to think critically whatsoever about what those themes even mean (let alone who they can possibly hurt) in the first place
God that was an exhausting day on Twitter. Reading comprehension found dead in a ditch.
Nah, it was based on King criticizing Turmp, which MAGATs took offense to and spread lies in response.
They love feeling and superior about not reading "slop" there but they're indistinguishable from the average redditor.
The accusation of reading anything at all is deeply hurtful
It used to be so much better than it was, now it’s just kinda meh
It was my absolute favorite sub a couple years ago and the Brando Sando visit was iconic. Now the place is just stale as hell.
I am not sure the concept of books needed jerking, but here we are.
“I jerk off inside books and give life to words, Leavin concepts stuck together you’ve probably never heard”
Immortal Technique
Books and reading discourse is probably one of the most jerk worthy things possible, have you ever read an r/books post?
Nah honestly the great tragedy of the sub is that social media book culture absolutely huffs its own farts and could use a jerk or two.
Just look at the comments on any post where someone uses/wreck a book as a part of a craft. You get people clutching pearls and fainting like they're southern church mom's trying to win a purity contest.
The circlejerk sub sucks but it would be nice to have a more normal place to talk about books.
I love when they use some antique book as craft material and you get people clutching their pearls about how it's destroying a historic artifact and they should have donated it to a museum or historic society lmao.
Yeah, there are a lot of old books out there that are very rare and very valuable. But there are also a bunch of 100 year old books that were mass produced. Yeah, that book of poetry looks cool, but it was used by most schools back in that era and there are approximately five gazillion copies of it now.
I also like when they go "You should have donated it to a LIBRARY if you didn't want it anymore! THEY know how to preserve books." like libraries also don't throw out books all the time.
One of my college jobs was working the school library and wer literally threw out hundreds of books while I was there and that was barely 2 years long.
Like yes, books are important in a general sense. But the printing press has been figured out pretty well now! The individual physical books are no longer the point!
people read Fahrenheit 451 and their take away is "destroying books is bad" instead of "censorship and anti intellectualism is bad"
What is funny about this situation is that bookscirclejerk is usually the one to point out bad reading comprehension, but this time they all collectively misinterpreted what the OOP was saying and just rolled with it
I do enjoy that they have a bot that responds to “To be fair” with STFU
I haven’t visited that sub in a long time and I just remember it being jerking about sandorsen all the time and looking now it’s as stale as ever.
I'm confused
Neat.
Snapshots:
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Not surprised, r/bookscircljerk has always looked to me like the most mean spirited and irony poisoned of the big circlejerk subs.
You gotta mark this thread nsfw OP. Just got flashbanged by someone shit talking dungeon crawler carl and now I'm mad.
OMFG I SAW THAT TOO AND WAS ABOUT READY TO RIDE TO BATTLE
Don’t you dare refer to Her Royal Highness Princess Donut as SLOP tf do these ppl think they are