Bill (u/sodypop)

There was an idea …. to bring together a group of remarkable people, to see if they could become something more (by shitposting).

Warning, there be mild spoilers below.

The idea to ban half of r/ThanosDidNothingWrong had been floating around the community as early as May. This wasn’t too strange of an idea, given that the good guy in the movie to which this subreddit was dedicated to was similarly trying to save the universe by freeing up half its precious resources. As the subreddit began to approach 100K subscribers, more and more users began to rally behind the idea. By 6/29, the community had convinced the mods to get on board.

As the hype began to build on 7/2, the mods sought our help and approval to enact this feat over in r/ModSupport. Initially, we (the admins) pushed back due to uncertainty on how such a ban would impact site stability and staffing concerns due to the upcoming July 4th holiday. However, this seemingly only made the community more determined and they continued to petition us “to give ban.”

After Jason (u/alienth) did some more investigation on the engineering side, he realized this was actually technically possible and we began to formulate a plan internally. I informed the mods we could assist after all, and we decided to plan the event for 7/9. The community rejoiced.

At this point media began reporting on the event. The subreddit was consistently hitting the top spot on r/all, and quickly swelled with new subscribers. Lurkers and new users began coming out of the woodwork to participate so they could be eligible to be banned. By the weekend the subreddit already had risen to more than 500K subscribers. Naturally, we saw an epic number of memes begin to surface.

On 7/8, the draw became so great even the Russo brothers (directors of the film) and Josh Brolin (Thanos) joined in the fun. Joe Russo posted a link to this epic Instagram of a shirtless Josh Brolin giving a special message to redditors, including his signature snap. Shortly after, some amazing cosplay shitposts followed.

On 7/9, the day of “The Snap” the community peaked. With more than 700,000 subscribers, anticipation continued to build. It was so great that people began to doubt it would actually happen and began to question whether the moderators were pulling a ban-boozle.

By 4 p.m. PT we finally had everything ready to go and Jason started to stream his terminal window on Twitch. Before we could post about the stream, people saw we were live and word spread quickly to the mods who stickied a post to our stream. With a peak of 70K concurrent viewers we quickly shot up to the No. 1 spot on Twitch’s front page. During the 3+ hour stream we received nearly half a million unique views and almost 20K new Twitch followers.

The script took approximately 3 hours to run and banned 231,488 users total. Banned users were given “I don’t feel so good” flair, received a ban notification directing them to unsubscribe, then join their fellow banned souls over in /r/inthesoulstone. As the dust settled, the community quickly noticed that one of the Russo brothers was spared, while the other was banned.

Perfectly balanced.

Even the official Marvel account joined in on the fun.

By the next day the subscriber count had decreased back down to below 600K as banned users began to honor the request to unsubscribe. The mods recapped the event with a thank you post to everyone who participated. And just like Thanos, one of the mods retired from the subreddit to “watch the sun rise on a grateful universe.”

Just as well, from all of us at Reddit, we had a blast watching our community rally behind this weird and cool idea. As a thank you to all who participated, check your user page for a shiny new trophy. Stay tuned for a technical post and more to follow!