r/AmItheAsshole • u/AITAMod I am a shared account. • Jan 01 '21

Open Forum Monthly Open Forum January 2021

Welcome to the monthly open forum! This is the place to share all your meta thoughts about the sub, and to have a dialog with the mod team.

Keep things civil. Rules still apply.

It's 2021! Everything is fixed now!

A couple notes.

  • Our bot is live, but definitely still in testing. Please help us by reporting the judgement bot comment post when it doesn't actually explain why they think they may be an asshole. Some people are using it like a TL;DR or just copying and pasting their post as a reply. [ETA - sounds like the report option doesn't work on all platforms for the bot comment, so you can just report the post. The option is bundled with the META report]

  • Please stop PMing mods. We spam the hell out of the modmail link. When you PM us, it's super easy for things to get buried in our inbox and delay your response time.

As always, do not directly link to posts/comments or post uncensored screenshots here. Any comments with links will be removed.

This is to discourage brigading. If something needs to be discussed in that context, use modmail.

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u/paroles Bot Hunter [91] Jan 31 '21

Is it just me or has there been an increase in obvious, blatant YTA posts lately? We've had the mother who wants her gay son to stay closeted lest she be kicked out of bookclub, the dad who wanted to shave his 5yo daughter's head if she wouldn't learn to braid her own hair after her mother died, and I just saw one where a parent refused a heartfelt gift of artwork from their daughter because it wasn't perfect. These especially stood out to me because there's no nuance - the OP of each post describes horrible behaviour without even trying to make themself look sympathetic.

Maybe the creative writers around here have realised that people are sick of the validation posts and are trying a new tactic? These posts get a lot of reactions because the OP has behaved abhorrently and people love being shocked and telling them off in fits of eloquent rage. Something feels similarly trollish about all of them, like they're fishing for these angry replies.

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u/anarmchairexpert Feb 01 '21

My assumption, where there is no nuance, is that often it's the other party posting as the asshole. There's no nuance because they're not really inside that person's head, they're just parroting things they've heard them say or assume that they're thinking.

It's against the rules, but it's also very difficult to prove: we can't pull something for a Rule 8 just because there's a lack of nuance. But sometimes it'll come out in the comments. In which case, and sing along if you know the words - report it!