Le Reddit Army

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About

"Le Reddit Army" is an ironic nickname for YouTube commenters who post intentionally inflammatory statements on the video-sharing site, often using roleplay accounts parodying various online stereotypes.

Origin

The earliest known reference to "le Reddit army" was in a post submitted by Redditor abenji on September 7th, 2012, which compared those who leave "reddit army" comments on YouTube to the Squeeze Toy Alien characters from the Toy Story films. Prior to being archived, the post gained over 1,900 votes (93% upvoted) on the /r/funny^[10] subreddit. In the comments section, many speculated that 4chan users were posting the "le Reddit army" comments on YouTube in an attempt to embarrass Redditors.

Precursors

In 2010, the French masculine singular definite article "le" became widely used on Reddit in rage comics. In 2011, 4chan users engaged in an online feud with 9gag users who referred to themselves as the "9gag army."

Spread

On September 27th, 2012, the Le-Reddit-Army^[11] Reddit account was created. On December 30th, 2013, YouTuber SwampLabs uploaded a video titled "Le Reddit Army," featuring a slideshow of various subreddits and the site "9gag" repeated in the video description (shown below).

On June 10th, 2014, the r/RedditArmie^[1] subreddit was created, which typically features screenshots of YouTube roleplay accounts mimicking various infamous Internet stereotypes, including self-proclaimed nice guys, atheists, fedora-wearers, feminists, meme enthusiasts, men's rights activists and Reddit evangelists.

On September 3rd, the Berta Lovejoy^[3] YouTube account was created, which leaves flamebait comments from the perspective of a feminist extremist on trending videos (shown below). On October 11th, Urban Dictionary^[9] user KJFK submitted an entry for "le reddit army," defining the members as "Reddit trolls" who comment on links submitted to the /r/videos subreddit.

On November 12th, Redditor drumdiary released the "Hide Fedora" browser extension,^[6] which automatically hides "le Reddit army" comments on YouTube. Several months later, the extension was featured in an article on The Daily Dot.^[7] As of March 2015, the extension has over 67,000 users on Google Chrome and 7,600 users on Mozilla Firefox.