A subreddit for Thanos apologists is voluntarily banning half of its members
(Spoilers for The Avengers: Infinity War below.)
Because Reddit is, ultimately, the world’s largest repository of incredibly stupid inside jokes, one sub-forum devoted to Infinity War antagonist Thanos is undertaking a massive effort to ban half of its members. The collective originally came together some three months ago, united by the notion that Thanos’ universe-halving finger-snap at the end of the film was actually a good and cool idea, thus spawning the meme that gives the forum its name: “Thanos did nothing wrong.”
Generally, this has taken the form of memes about achieving balance and randomly cutting things in half (beards, etc.). But a few days ago, the idea to randomly ban half of the subreddit came up as a means of really testing their conviction for Thanos apologia. In order to gauge whether or not they really had the stomach for it, moderators waited until a post got 60,000 upvotes—half of the sub’s population at the time—and when it soared right past that, they started looking into the feasibility of a mass ban. Moderator The-Jedi-Apprentice was gently persuaded by Reddit admins to not do the ban right around July 4, since many of the site’s engineers would be on holiday, and so now the self-extinction date is set for this coming Monday, July 9. A bot is being designed to help cull the hordes, which have grown precipitously as news of the stunt spread: Right now, there are almost 350,000 members, a number which will surely grow before the mass extinction event on Monday. It’ll be the largest ban in Reddit history.
Of course, after being banned, there’s nothing to stop people from then rejoining r/thanosdidnothingwrong, but that’d sort of ruin the whole thing, right? Banned members are planning to congregate in new subs named after the Soul Stone, an allusion to a popular theory that would resurrect all of the dead Avengers from Infinity War. What we’ll have at that point is two massive groups of Thanos apologists play-acting as characters in an enormous in-universe thought experiment, which can only mean one thing: Meme warfare.
Let’s just hope those r/prequelmemes people don’t get involved. They are militant.
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