Reddit can be a wonderful place that encourages healthy discussions and allows people to find others with similar interests, no matter how niche they may be, but it also has a bit of a reputation for toxicity, misogyny, and just straight-up meanness thanks to some of its less-polite users. Combine that with the way Reddit allows you to “upvote” posts you like and “downvote” the ones you don’t, and suddenly the unpopular posts could be just as fascinating as the popular ones. That’s what a Cornell student names Horace He seems to think, at least, because he’s developed a site called NotReddit.Top that pulls data from the main Reddit site and catalogs the ones with the most downvotes. Like the real Reddit, it even lets users sort posts by the past day, the past month, the past hour, the past year, and all time, meaning NotReddit.Top lets you easily dig up the most-downvoted things ever posted on Reddit.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out that those less-polite users are really big fans of the downvote feature, as almost all of these so-called “most hated” posts revolve around people getting mad when they’re told to behave better:
A few of the ones in there are classic internet activism, like the Ann Coulter AMA and Westboro Baptist Church post, which were downvoted by Redditors who wanted to ignore people they don’t agree with. However, the majority are posts from mods telling users to stop abusing people, including a post from (now former) Reddit executives who made a decision to ban specific subreddits that were based entirely on bullying people. Naturally, that was controversial.
Now, the internet being what it is, it’s probably just a matter of time before people start making posts on Reddit with the expressed purpose of reaching the top of this list, so let’s make use of this resource while we can.