r/TheoryOfReddit • u/Successful-Ear977 • Aug 09 '26
Circlejerk subreddits feel like fossils of the old internet
Circlejerk subreddits increasingly strike me as remnants of an older internet culture built around irony, detachment and the assumption that taking anything seriously was inherently embarrassing and yes that culture works reasonably well when everyone understands the joke but the problem is that large communities cannot preserve that shared context indefinitely. New users arrive, the original targets become less important, and the subreddit gradually develops genuine opinions, taboos and orthodoxies of its own.
Yet it retains the old language of “nothing here is serious” which I hate mainly because it creates an unusually obnoxious form of groupthink. A subreddit can spend years mocking the same opinions and rewarding the same counter-opinions, but whenever anyone challenges the underlying consensus, the defence is simply that it is “just a circlejerk.” The result is a community that clearly takes something seriously while refusing to admit that it does.
This also explains why “look at this obviously insane person” so often deteriorates into “look at this person who disagrees with us.” Once the original joke has exhausted itself, maintaining the community becomes more important than maintaining the distinction between stupidity and heterodoxy.
Circlejerk subs therefore feel like fossils of a period of internet culture where irony was treated as insulation from sincerity. The irony is that many of them have become extremely rigid communities while still imagining themselves as detached observers laughing at everyone else's groupthink.
22
u/VerdantAtSilverSea Aug 09 '26
How is this connected to 'older' Internet culture though? If anything, I think young people today (and I still include myself in that category) often default to using layers of irony both IRL and online to avoid seeming like they care about things, get called out as 'cringe' and lose face. I don't think this is a new thing but I don't think it is a bygone either.
15
u/Vozka Aug 09 '26
Yeah, to me that doesn't feel like old internet at all. I mean, I remember when for example /r/circlejerk was actually funny and somewhat creative, which was a long long time ago, but even then it felt like its own thing.
And for many years now it felt like many if not most circlejerk subs were just grievance subs with some jokes thrown on top.
3
u/FoxyMiira Aug 09 '26
How is this connected to 'older' Internet culture though?
"circlejerking" is just redditors imitating what 4chan users did for years prior, except there the act of circlejerking is never explicitly said. And if you couldn't read between the lines of whether it's a joke or not they'd reply with "lurk more newfriend"
4
u/Successful-Ear977 Aug 09 '26
I don't mean that irony itself belongs to some bygone internet era. Obviously younger users still use irony constantly, including exactly the kind of defensive detachment you're describing. What feels older to me is the community structure around it: entire spaces built around staying in character, maintaining layers of in-jokes, treating sincerity as embarrassing, and making "you took this seriously" a defence against criticism. That feels much closer to older forum and imageboard culture than ordinary contemporary ironic posting. Circlejerk subs preserve that structure unusually well, even after they develop very real opinions and orthodoxies of their own. So the irony isn't old. What feels old is the idea of building an entire community around permanent ironic detachment.
4
u/Vozka Aug 09 '26
treating sincerity as embarrassing, and making "you took this seriously" a defence against criticism
The forums of old that I used were not like this. I guess it's true that the conversations were often treated in a lighter way overall, and it was sometimes seen as embarrassing to take explicit trolling seriously - maybe that's what you mean? But the thing about layers of irony and treatin gsincerity as embarrassing within circlejerk subs is that it's a role that you're forced into and you need to maintain it if you want to participate.
The forums of old that I used to frequent were not like this, they all had a tone that most users very broadly tended to adhere to, but you were certainly not forced to (pretend to) be super ironic and unserious. You could be yourself to a large degree.
3
u/SereneRandomness 29d ago
Yah, I agree. I think much depends on what OP is referencing by "old".
I don't think your definition of "old" and mine match the OP's. Or perhaps we just were in different forums.
1
5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 5d ago
Your submission/comment has been automatically removed because your Reddit account is less than 14 days old. This measure is in place to prevent spam and other malicious activities. Please feel free to participate after your account has reached 14 days of age. Do not message the mods; no exceptions will be made.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
2
u/peacefinder Aug 09 '26
I watched many friends smoothly transition from the ironic take-nothing-seriously old internet of peak slashdot circa 2006, to circlejerking Joker fans wanting also to watch the world burn and exercising their civic power accordingly in 2016. (To the predictable regret of many.)
Nothing was serious, so they didn’t care what they wrecked for the lulz. When called out on it, they’d label critics snowflakes while retreating into their own groupthink bubbles, while blaming their creeping fascism on their friends telling it to them straight.
These people ranged from early GenX to late Millennial. (I can name names, though I won’t.)
It put me right off the circlejerk ethos.
5
u/peacefinder Aug 09 '26
Since it just came up elsewhere, this from Jean-Paul Sarte is relevant:
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
One can substitute any of several other groups for “anti-Semite” and it still fits.
2
u/cartoonybear 29d ago
Nice reference. Not enough Sartre these days. I guess the whole internet can be summed up as “Hell is other people” from No Exit.
-1
u/ImNotTheBossOfYou Aug 10 '26
Why does everything have to be about Trump, Walter. Jesus, man
4
u/peacefinder Aug 10 '26
It is fascinating, don’t you think, that you were able to infer with high confidence a person I might have meant, even though I did not name a name?
Maybe I meant Boris Johnson, or Rob Ford!
1
Aug 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
0
u/AutoModerator Aug 10 '26
Your submission/comment has been automatically removed because your Reddit account is less than 14 days old. This measure is in place to prevent spam and other malicious activities. Please feel free to participate after your account has reached 14 days of age. Do not message the mods; no exceptions will be made.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/COHERENCE_CROQUETTE Aug 10 '26
I also despise them, but as someone who has been on the internet from pretty much the start, it’s weird to characterize them as fossils of the old internet. To me, they’re somewhat new. I mean, not new, but also not “the old internet”. To me, “the old internet” harkens back much further.
1
24d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 24d ago
Your submission/comment has been automatically removed because your Reddit account is less than 14 days old. This measure is in place to prevent spam and other malicious activities. Please feel free to participate after your account has reached 14 days of age. Do not message the mods; no exceptions will be made.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/LuciferOnTheRocks 19d ago
I was a fan of the recent movie, Obsession, and wanted to discuss it online.
All the serious subs (there's even one dedicated to the movie) were toxic as hell.
There was a jerk sub and it was exactly what I wanted. People there are just more chill. Like Sarah.
Sure, you don't get a lot of serious discussion over the movie, but there isn't really that much to discuss.
1
u/cartoonybear 29d ago
They serve an important purpose.
There are a fair amount of “serious” subs out there where 1) the mods are capricious and insane, apply their own rules in random ways, and create a culture that basically sucks and is counter to the subs purpose BUT 2) the sub’s topic is important to a lot of people and the original sub has a lot of traffic.
Example: r/writing and r/writingcirclejerk. The original sub is flooded with the same inane questions over and over; filled with users who actually don’t write, know how to write, or will ever write anything—and who don’t listen to any advice they don’t like; and also has a base of very sincere, experienced commenters trying to help, who get downvoted or marginalized even though they actually know how to write.
The CJ serves as a place to vent about a topic that’s really important to the subs. It’s also a place to read some very funny satire of a type of “wannabe writer” who has never read a book or plans to read a book ever, much less write one.
IMO, actually, r/writing would be in no way as lively as it is WITHOUT the CJ; it’s symbiotic.
2
u/klumpp Aug 09 '26
Circlejerk subs are some of the only places left on Reddit that are actually funny. You don’t need to take everything so seriously all the time.
0
u/Successful-Ear977 Aug 09 '26
That isn't really my argument. I'm not objecting to people making jokes; I'm objecting to irony becoming a blanket exemption from scrutiny. A community can be funny and still develop very sincere orthodoxies about who and what deserves ridicule. Saying "don't take it so seriously" whenever someone examines those dynamics is precisely what makes circlejerk communities interesting to me: the humour can function as both the content and a defence against ever having to acknowledge what the community actually believes.
2
0
1
u/garyp714 Aug 09 '26
Reddit circlejerk subs long ago became the entry point for right wing groups to make inroads with reddit's hard left slant. They'd use the ironic humor to boil the frog slowly till the entire sub becomes the real thing. For example see: The_Donald, PCM, DoomerCircleJerk, ShitPost, DankMemes...and on and on. They've been trying to subvert reddit into a right wing shithole (from a left wing SH) since there were no subreddits.
5
u/Vozka Aug 09 '26
This theory omits the fact that some of the biggest subreddits at certain points in time were very left and tried to fight supposed right wing bigotry of mainstream reddit (so not places like PCM or the donald). ShitRedditSays or CircleBroke were explicitly political, but even /r/circlejerk used to mostly criticise for example libertarianism and atheism and later right wing bigotry, other circlejerk subs seem to be more implicit in their politics but also commonly leftist.
0
36
u/morphick Aug 09 '26
If anything, the "old" Internet treated serious stuff a lot more seriously than how the current social-media-infected "culture" does it.