Data · 9 Oct 2019 · 3 min

Percentage charts for r/AmItheAsshole

The subreddit's five verdicts, counted from the comments it attracted.

r/AmItheAsshole is where people post an argument and ask a jury of strangers to rule on it. Every thread resolves into one of five verdicts, and the votes are written in the replies as four-letter codes — which makes the whole subreddit unusually easy to count.

The subreddit describes itself as:

A catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us, and a place to finally find out if you were wrong in an argument that's been bothering you. Tell us about any non-violent conflict you have experienced; give us both sides of the story, and find out if you're right, or you're the asshole.

The counting

The 2019 version of this page fetched each thread's comments straight from reddit.com as JSON, counted how often each verdict appeared, and drew a percentage bar. It did not use a CORS-enabled fetch — it called $.getJSON with &jsonp=?, which is a <script> tag, and a <script> tag is not subject to CORS. This page asks the subreddit for its recent comments the same way, through js/posts/reddit-jsonp.js.

Reddit does not always answer, and when it refuses — 403 Blocked, which is what an unauthenticated client tends to get — the script never loads and the page falls back to what you paste, saying so in the readout.

Everything after the text arrives is the same. Paste a thread's comments below and the page counts them exactly as the 2019 script did: raw occurrences of the five tokens, case sensitively, with no attempt to work out who was replying to whom.

The interesting thing in both of those is how much of the verdict is in the disagreement. The dog thread had three people saying everyone sucked, and the baby thread had four saying nobody did — the subreddit is less decisive than its name suggests.

Bye.

Written in 2019, ported from the old Hugo site and lightly edited. The counting and the chart are unchanged. The demo asks reddit.com for the subreddit's recent comments through the same JSONP script tag the 2019 version used; pasted text is the fallback for when Reddit will not answer.