Reddit is a forum-based social media website known for its vast network of niche communities.Influencers clutter the feeds of many online users. Amid oversharing, overconsumption, cancellations and controversies, it can be hard not to hate. While a user can leave a mean or critical comment on Instagram or TikTok, the original poster still has the power to filter and delete comments, allowing them to control the narrative. However, there is a haven for those who cannot satisfy their urge in TikTok comment sections: “influencer snark Reddit Reddit is a forum-based social media website known for its vast network of niche communities..”
Snark is a subredditsubreddit A page on Reddit dedicated to a certain community genre where users flock to mock, criticize, and gossip about any niche, from crafting to multi-level marketing schemes. Influencer snark is a particularly robust subsect with a myriad of pages dedicated to snarking on both individuals and groups of digital celebrities and creators. One of the most popular influencer snark subreddits is r/LAinfluencersnark, a page that describes itself as a “place to discuss and snark on LA-based influencers.”
When you open the subreddit r/r/ r/ is used on Reddit to indicate the title of a subredditLAinfluencersnark, you cannot predict what will be on the front page. There might be a debate speculating about the status of an 18-year-old’s plastic surgery, a thread of this year’s worst Coachella outfits, an autopsy of the career of a creator who has entered their “flop era,” or more serious topics like scamming, racism allegations and exploitation. It is all part of the influencer snark landscape. The community’s robust and sometimes ruthless engagement has propelled the subreddit to the top 2% of all Reddit communities.
An active contributor to the snark is u/u/ u/ is used on Reddit to indicate a username in lieu of the @ symbolrhaenyras_revenge, a 22-year-old woman living in Minnesota who chose to be identified by her Reddit username for this article. She stumbled upon snark culture after facing downvotes for her snarky comments on the subreddit of the reality-dating show The Bachelor.
“I would comment kind of snarky things on like Bachelor Nation subreddit and the Bachelor subreddit, and I’d always had super downvoted,” said u/rhaenyras_revenge. But then she was introduced to snark: “I was like, wait, what is that? So I looked it up and was like, ‘Oh? Is that a thing?’ People have different pages where they can snark on people.”
Now, she is a frequent contributor on r/LAinfluencersnark, r/NYCinfluencersnark (the unaffiliated snark Reddit responsible for gossip regarding East Coast influencers) and numerous other snark pages. She is so dedicated to snark that she made a separate account just for snarking at the beginning of this year, which has already accumulated almost 10,000 Reddit Karmakarma Karma is Reddit's system of "useless internet points" that represent how much a user has contributed to the community through posts, comments, and upvotes.. She estimates that she uses Reddit for about five hours a day. Her bio used to be “hater first, feminist second,” but now proclaims, “my haterism has no bounds.”
“Sometimes I’m like, oh my god, yes. I’ve always thought this, and everyone told me I was taking it too far.”
u/rhaenyras_revenge, age 22
U/rhaenyras_revenge explained that it is validating to hear other users’ opinions match her own: “Sometimes I’m like, oh my god, yes. I’ve always thought this, and everyone told me I was taking it too far.”
Internet anthropologist Robert Kozinets, author of the textbook Influencers and Creators: Business, Culture, and Practice, observes that anonymity gives people a shield to say things without consequence.
“People who want to attack others who they see as successful are full of themselves. And that’s just kind of human nature,” explained Kozinets, “It comes out when they have a forum. And it’s a very low penalty for them. And they feel like they can say whatever they want because they can hide behind a pseudonym or an account name.”
While users like u/rhaenyras_revenge are busy snarking, a team is moderating the subreddit behind the scenes and determining when the snark has gone too far.
“There’s definitely an ethic and morality to this role that I’m working with,” says r/LAinfluencersnark moderator R.T., who goes by u/sstonedfoxx and chose to be identified by her first and last initial for this article.
R.T. had been an avid Reddit user for years but had never been a moderator before this page. She joined the community when it had around 500 members and was first onboarded as an assistant moderator by a user who moderated many influencer snark communities. About a year into R.T.’s role as an assistant moderator, the subreddit founder disappeared and stopped responding to anything; later, her account was deleted. This left R.T. alone to manage this rapidly growing Reddit community.
She spends hours a day monitoring the page, but not a single person in her real life knows she does it. R.T. decides what belongs on the subreddit and what doesn’t, following a list of rules, including no body shaming, no doxxingdoxxing searching for and publishing private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent. and no off-topic discussion.
“In the middle of my job, too. So I’m having to help people [at work]. And then I have my phone blowing up on the side. It’s really stressful,” explained R.T.
The workload became overwhelming for one person. After a year of moderating alone, R.T. decided to onboard a new moderator, Tiff Turner, aka u/Pizza__bitch.
Turner is a 31-year-old living in Toronto who pleaded to become a co-moderator of the page because she had ideas for improvements. She has been a Reddit user for over a decade and has experience moderating two other subreddits, but r/LAinfluencersnark is the most high-profile page she has worked on.
Turner had many changes she wanted to make to the page and only agreed to moderate if she could implement them. Luckily for her, R.T. passed over the reins.
“She needed my help,” said Turner. “I was like, I’m only going to join if we’re on the same page about these things, and I essentially said that anything about body shaming, anything about mental health… physical health, anything like that the person can’t change, I think is going too far.”
Turner outlined the changes in a new post, which encourages users to “Provide critique without resorting to excessively negative criticisms or highly personal attacks” and forbids “body shaming, arm chair diagnosing, disordered eating speculation, or addiction speculation.”
Though these changes may make the subreddit less negative, Turner explained that user feedback she has gathered points to snarkers wanting less moderation.
“I was like, damn, people really think we should be allowed to talk about anything,” said Turner, “nothing is off-topic. Nothing is deemed going too far.”
Despite this feedback, Turner takes her new role seriously and spends hours daily enforcing her new rules.
“There’s constant arguing, constant insanity that I kind of just have to be there,” explained Turner. “I feel like otherwise, people are literally harassing each other. And an hour goes by, two hours go by. I’m like, holy crap. I’ve been on Reddit for five hours today.”
The work they put into moderating is supplemented by AutoModerator bots that enforce the rules and automatically remove posts.
But bots can’t do it all, R.T. and Turner have had to navigate nuanced scenarios, including legal teams getting involved in taking down posts about specific clients.
“There have been lawyers that have reached out to me,” said R.T., “and I’ve had to take down all of these with all of these posts, with comments and doxxing.”
“It just fills the emptiness of my life.”
Tiff Turner, age 31
However, Turner pointed out that there has been no proof that these have been actual lawyers, rather than fans or influencers posing as lawyers.
“He could literally be anyone. Just like a superfan being like, we need to get these posts removed,” explained Turner. “I feel like maybe we should take it a step further. Ask them for proof.”
The new subreddit rules include a policy regarding how to disclose when posts are requested to be taken down.
Unlike moderator R.T., most people in Turner’s personal life know about her time-consuming gossip-centric hobby.
“They all think it’s really stupid that I give, like, give a shit about celebrities or influencers and stuff like that,” said Turner. “I remind them it’s not that I care about them [the influencers]; it’s just like a hobby. It just fills the emptiness of my life.”
The page’s traffic has only continued to grow, so in late April of this year, the moderating duo opened an application to recruit a new moderator to their team. Their post states they are looking for someone who is unbiased and fair, enjoys pop culture, and wants to make the subreddit a better place. According to Turner, they have 15 applicants, which is not quite as many as they had hoped.
“Seems a lot of people have plenty of time to snark everyday [sic] but very few people who want to make time to modmod Reddit slang for moderator,” said Turner in a statement over Reddit direct message.
Although R.T. and Turner dedicate significant time to managing the subreddit, they both said they rarely make the posts themselves.
In addition to the active snarkers and moderators, a population of Reddit lurkers read but never comment or post on the forums. r/LAinfluencersnark has over 80,000 members, but according to R.T. upwards of 3 million users visit the page weekly.
Gabriella, an 18-year-old Reddit user who chose to be identified by only her first name, posts on other subreddits occasionally but is strictly a lurker when it comes to snark.
“I’m never actively posting on a snark Reddit,” says Gabriella, “just because there is a certain level of ‘what if someone knows this is me’ and I’m exposed as being this undercover hater on all these celebrities and all these people. So that definitely keeps me back a little.”
Gabriella underscores the allure of anonymity in these communities and the insights they offer, albeit often speculative and unverified.
“There’s information here that you wouldn’t see on a news channel or stuff that’s being published because these are people who know that they’re anonymous on the subreddit,” explains Gabriella. “So I’m hearing about people’s interactions with these celebrities and these influencers, who they’re sleeping with or what scams they’re doing or how they’re secretly poor.”
“When I see people talking badly about people who I think are so beautiful or so successful, it’s a bad thing. But it makes me feel somewhat better about myself.”
Gabriella, age 18
Gabriella said that she has always hate-watched reality TV and influencers, and Reddit serves as an extension of that guilty pleasure.
“These subreddits feel like the underbelly of kind of like the LA influencer world and the celebrity world,” she explained. “When I see people talking badly about people who I think are so beautiful or so successful, it’s a bad thing. But it makes me feel somewhat better about myself.”
Cady, a 27-year-old who lives in Chicago and chose to be identified by first name, is a fellow snark Reddit lurker. She sees influencer snark Reddit as echoing the traditional role of gossip magazines but with a digital twist.
“These influencers are posting so much of their life. So there’s just a lot of material to grasp onto,” says Cady, “whereas, like, celebrities, I feel like, are becoming more private.”
Many influencers are well aware of these pages and post about them. When gathering sources for this piece, several influencers declined to comment, citing fears of becoming a bigger target for snark. There has also been speculation surrounding influencers allegedly trying to get themselves posted on the pages.
“Those influencers themselves have set have said that they’ve been on snark Reddit and that they’ve been reading what people are saying about them,” says Gabriella, “so I know subconsciously like it is affecting the way that celebrities and social media people are presenting their content to the world.”
“If you’ve got the power to harm someone, that is power. So these people clearly have some power,” said Kozinets, who calls that power “coercive power.”
Breelyn, age 23, is a frequent Reddit snark viewer and occasional commenter who chose to be identified by only her first name in this article. She sees snark Reddit as “everything that is wrong regarding social media, and the human mind in general.”
“It is, in my opinion, just every man for himself on social media that if you post anything, you have to post it with the assumption that you’re gonna get hate”
Breelyn, age 23
She explained that, though she does not approve of people’s snark, it is an inevitability of the internet’s current state.
“We live in a very individual individualistic society. And there is no camaraderie at all anymore,” she explained. “It is, in my opinion, just every man for himself on social media that if you post anything, you have to post it with the assumption that you’re gonna get hate, you’re gonna get body shamed. In some way or another, you’re gonna get judged.”
Turner emphasized that though she spends a lot of time in the snark world, she does not think that Snark subreddits are a good thing for her or society, “I think they’re so fucking unhealthy. For probably me, too.”
R.T. also knows that the page can do a lot of harm.
“I can’t say a lot of positivity has come out of it, unfortunately,” says R.T. “You shouldn’t have your life put on blast like that. But at the same time, I keep it up because maybe the right people need to see it.”
R.T. says she doesn’t know why she spends her time doing this, but she also takes pride in the quality of her moderating: “The ethical part of me is like, if someone else has it in their hands, maybe they won’t be as you know, nice about it, and, you know, a lot of people won’t have their justice in a way.”
Snark Reddit Confessional
In addition to the sources in the main text piece, I also fielded submissions from snark Reddit users on the condition of anonymity to share their experiences using the forums. Click below to play the compilation of responses to specific questions
The Anatomy of a Snark Post
For the non-Reddit literate, explore this interactive post to get a taste of what a typical snark post looks like
The Anatomy of a Snark Post
Snark Reddit by the Numbers
Amidst the gossip-centric snark Reddit community, it is interesting to look at a numeric breakdown of the posts on the subreddit. Below are graphs built with data extracted from the r/LAinfluencersnark page in spring 2024.
With the subreddit’s ruthless reputation, it may seem strange that positive posts slightly outnumber negative posts, but this could be because of the stricter moderation implemented in the past few months.
The above graph shows that female pronouns far outweigh male pronouns in r/LAinfluencersnark, which is a trend that was anecdotally echoed in several interviews.
Reporter’s Note and Acknowledgements
For the purposes of this article and to prevent further perpetuation of negativity, influencers’ identities have been obscured in the post visuals. Readers can visit snark Reddit pages at their own discretion, but this piece is intended to be read without the need to engage with the subreddits.
Thank you to all of the Reddit users and moderators who spoke to me and gave me a window into their community. Thank you to Professor Robert V. Kozinets for his expert insights, Anne Fogarty for helping collect and analyze the data for the interactive graphs, and Professor Robert Hernandez for his guidance.