I look forwards to the silliness.
Also, that Jack Sparrow meme is amazing. I applaud whoever edited that.
As much as I hate seeing comments get deleted to a question I'm curious about, I'm thankful that the mods here do a good job of keeping this sub on track. I've seen mods of other subreddits basically fall apart just trying to keep a joke subreddit intact, let alone one that insists on using sources and in-depth commentary. You mods do a good job of keeping this community alive and well, and deserve some recognition. So thanks for volunteering your time and making this subreddit reliably amazing.
No April Fool's here :)
As usual this is the April fool's I look forward to the most!
I've also got to give props to the Jean sans Peur account for putting spaces in between the end of the sentence and exclamation/question marks - just as a real Frenchman should !
r/HighQualityGifs in my r/AskHistorians !?
Wow, I can finally comment on this sub, rejoice if only for a day 😂. (But thanks to the mods for creating the absolutely outstanding environment this sub has, hope you enjoy the day as much as the rest of us ❤️)
This gif is a work of art. Also, just want to extend a quick thank you to the mods cuz you guys have kept this subreddit together and on track with your incredibly diligent moderation, and I know that whenever I browse the subreddit I can get interesting, informed comments about history.
Can we request specific AITA? I have the idea for one, but I know I am too much of a lurker to get any flair or anything, so I'd figure I can bring it up to someone and see if they are willing to submit it
I love this theme. I'm studying to be a history teacher and I think that this kind of thing would be a super fun classroom activity--so many people think of history as being so dry and hard to relate to, but in reality, so much crazy and entertaining shit has happened, and it's fun to play around with describing historical events as if they were things happening now.
I love everything about this. This sub on a normal day, this sub on April fools day, and this meme. It’s all amazing. Thank you.
On comments getting deleted, the extension works great, but only in-browser. Is there any way to make it work in the app?
Unrelated but you know how that thing where if you watch a movie or something you start zeei.g it everywhere? I watched POTC past night and I've seen like 8 memes of it in the last hour alone
Highest quality sub Im subscribed to, thanks mods
I’ve waited all week wondering what the AskHistorians joke would be this year. At last, it is here. It’s what I’ve been needing in these trying times.
I say, as if I didn’t find out last night and it’s not the end of the day.
This was the most absolutely amazing edit of a movie scene into a meme I have ever experienced. Everything is a perfect depiction of how it goes on this subreddit. My hat is off. You have won the internet. I can finally die in peace.
Brilliant. Many thanks to everyone who has taken the time and the trouble to write a submission.
That GIF made my day, thank you! That was hilarious.
Ah that's why the posts have been entertaining af! I am loving it
oh, so y'all fuckin know
Damn, I already went and wrote one for Evelyn Waugh, probably one of the biggest assholes who ever lived. Welp, maybe next year, sweet whiskers!
Initially I was confused why I had never seen an answer, now I am fully on board with the practice. Good old mods, thank you
These are great lol
This event is so much fun already! I'm somewhat disappointed I can't post the AITA I thought up as Hatshepsut, but I understand why. Thank you so much for hosting this, and thank you to everyone who's posting!
Lol this sums up my feelings about this sub perfectly
Love it! Great job on the video.
I love this sub so much.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏bravissimo!!
Good morning everyone!
For those who have already woken up, you'll notice that since 00:00 UTC, things have been a little silly around here. As is tradition, for April Fools we let our hairdown a little bit and allow some frivolity to infest the subreddit. This year we are doing /r/HistoricalAITA, in the style of /r/AmITheAsshole!
Until 23:59, we are allowing 'AITA' style submissions to be made by the approved alt accounts of the Flaired Users of the subreddit, but are relaxing the rules for commenting in all threads with the 'April Fools' Flair. The only rules in effect are those concerning civility, and as long as it is done in a joking manner towards the flaired alts, we even have some leeway there. Please just avoid racial, misogynistic, and other bigoted slurs.
You are welcome to make your own alts to comment with, although we won't be flairing them, but please only use them in April Fools threads. We will ban novelty accounts if they post in character elsewhere.
#For a Full Rundown of all the Submissions, Check This Out
With the ground rules dispensed with, a few quick additional notes are to be made, as we've already had a few modmails asking why submissions are restricted.
This was something we spent a lot of time thinking about, and the initial plan was to open submissions to everyone, but in the end we decided to pull back and only allow submissions by flaired users for several reasons.
The first is that while we want it to be a fun event, with humorous content, we do want to maintain some level of control over the quality, and allowing any submissions by anyone means there inevitably will be peddling of common myths and plain old bad history to a degree we wouldn't want.
Even aside from the bad history factors, there are several other internal guidelines which we know Flairs will easily follow - Hitler is already an asshole, we don't need to vote on it! - but we would no doubt see many submissions from and wished to avoid.
The other issue is scope. The balance of the event is important, and we don't want it to be flooded with too many submissions. A few years ago when we did /r/AskFantasyHistorians, we were getting dozens of submissions every minute at the peak! I think we had close to 1000 by the end of it, which meant that a lot of really hilarious content which people put a lot of work into got seen by no one simply because it was drowned out by sheer volume. There is too much of a good thing in a case like this, and allowing mass submissions in that way would likely lead to such a situation. We want to see a lot of good, varied content, but not to the degree that a user can't reasonably check out most of it in an afternoon.
The issue of scope also has a more pragmatic side this year in particular, as, well.. it's a weird time to be joking! We almost considered cancelling an event this year, but in the end decided that people would probably appreciate having a chance to enjoy some levity, as this kind of thing can definitely help destress, but that also meant that we wanted to scale back a bit. We usually do a 48 hour event starting at UTC+14 with the philosophy that when it is April 1st anywhere, it is for us, but this year just a straight 24 hours from UTC 00:00 to 23:59 to keep it more contained, and likewise we don't want to see things go too out of control so that if it ended up falling flat (which it does not seem to have happened!) we could quickly pull thing back and tone down further, which is much easier when it is only Flairs submitting.
We do certainly realize it can be disappointing for some, but hopefully anyone who was hoping to make their own submission understands the reasoning behind it, and also enjoys leveling judgements on the posts made!
Nice.
Oh my god this is fantastic, Jack's username was the cherry on top
I think that this theme is very america centric - from a culture/discourse standpoint, but that's ok, it's just one day and another year it can be another theme.
Can we make this a more common feature? I think we all need some levity during this pandemic.
If that's not possible, could you at least open r/HistoricalAITA?
The sub is unreadable. I have to avoid the place every year because of this.
Is there some benefit to not providing any actual academic discussion?
So, it's going to be the same joke with every post?
Jesus, I picked the worst day to take off work
this sub is so ridiculous, you're fully aware that reddit's karma system works to highlight the best replies, the literal only reason this site works, yet you still seem to think that if you go far enough out of your way to explain why you have to exert control over others people will buy it
no one here really respects these rules or sees value in them, we just put up with your nonsense in the off chance we'll actually catch a good answer while scrolling through our feeds, which often isn't the case if you're on reddit a lot and not specifically looking to go back in time on this sub