DuggarSnark is a place for people to gather and mock the Duggar Family. The Duggars are the stars of a reality TV show 19 Kids and Counting (formerly 17 and 18). The family are Baptists, and are incredibly committed to their religion.
The series would eventually be cancelled, as one of the children, Josh Duggar, turned out to be a sex pest.
All of these factors made the show catnip for a particular audience of online obsessive, who would congregate in the subreddit “DuggarSnark” to report on every little movement of the family.
This would expand into “FundieSnark”, which was aimed at all fundamentalist Christian influencers (the fund in fundie), which itself would splinter off into “FundieSnarkUncensored” (an uncensored subreddit is usually a sign of bad things).
The rise of snarking
Subreddits dedicated to gossiping about celebrities would become known as “snark” subreddits, and has seen a sudden growth over the past year.
Some notable examples include /r/travisandtaylor and /r/saintmeghanmarkle: both have appeared within my /r/popular feed on a logged out account.
These subreddits all feature the same thing: a laser like focus on a few small set of people, with a large audience (primarily women) dissecting every little action, and recontextualising it in the worst possible light.
The Meghan Markle one is, as you expect, obsessed with Meghan Markle, but also the rest of the Royal Family. Not only is her “failing” a bad indictment on them, them succeeding is also bad for her, in some bizarre bootlicking contest.
One of them looks like they’re about to poop and cry… and it’s not the baby
“Not a loving bone in her body. So unnatural with children.”
“Jesus, she is scary. I think she was just born "off." There'd no shred of humanity or soul in her at all.”
“Seriously. It's giving "Get this thing off me" vibes.”
“Meanwhile, Boss Baby and Catherine!”
“Maybe she should call her father since he's the only one of her parents who has experience raising children LOL”
The last one is ridiculous: hyper-analysing the body language of a relatively new mother to determine some sort of conclusion.
(It’s also worth noting that potential racist outlook of these comments, a known issue for Royal Family devotes.)
This is just KiwiFarms
If I were to compare this behaviour to any other place on the internet, I’d pick KiwiFarms. KiwiFarms is a forum that gained notoriety for the targeted harassment of various online individuals. Despite many proclamations of its death, it continues to this day.
Threads are dedicated to individuals, and every action they take is chronicled and ridiculed. These threads span decades, and form a lore that informs future discussion. While participants are encouraged not to interact with the subject, this cannot be enforced in any reasonable way.
None of this is strictly factual: hearsay, poorly substantiated articles, and attempting to read the body language of others forms an important part of how the narrative comes to be. A brief facial expression can form a fundamental reading of the relationship between two people, regardless of what they say or do: largely because there is a perception that public individuals are continuously lying for their own gain, and the face gives away the truth in their souls.
You simply take individual posts from these threads, and make them posts within these subreddits, and it is the same thing.
Pretty Ugly Little Liars (PULL) was a similar forum, with a female slant: it too would target individuals and dissect them relentlessly, albeit with a focus on attractive ones, likely because the audience was perennially online and unattractive.
PULL is dead, but it seems to me that the principles behind it are present in these snark subreddits. The individuals appear just as deranged.
reddit will have to ask itself a question it has asked itself many times during its existence: should these types of subreddit be allowed to exist? While you can argue these forums are just exercises in gossip, the persistency of it raises eyebrows, especially when it contaminates the /r/popular feed.
When presented correctly, anything can look like fact. When these people have years worth of footage, and a narrative they’ve convinced themselves of, strangers can easily be pulled into the vortex - and we know from QAnon that not only can anyone get pulled into a vortex, but once they’re in, it is difficult to pull out.
I can’t say I know what the right answer is here
I really want to write this with a tight conclusion, but I can’t think of one.
KiwiFarms was loudly decried, but the primary problem was the harassment (and in particular, the targeting of transgendered people). If you take that aspect out of it, is there any problem to talk about?
Of course, it sucks if you’re one of the celebrities. You have to deal with a deluge of untruths, spun into most demoralising narratives possible - and realistically, you have no way of defending yourselves.
From the perspective of reddit, while you gain a captive audience of a demographic you’ve likely not catered to in the past, you are actively breeding a toxic waste on the website, that threatens to consume everything. We’ve known from /r/fatpeoplehate that creating specific spaces for hate does not result in good outcomes for the site health.
But at the very least, reddit should be well aware of what the annals of their website are comparable to.