Previously, Bored Panda reached out to the moderator team of Rare Insults to find out more about their community. The moderator Blank-Cheque told us that the subreddit “was originally founded by Gorangeninja two years ago, after he saw someone suggest it be made on another subreddit.”

Created in 2017, the subreddit was not an instant hit and was far from the Reddit powerhouse it is today. “The subreddit only grew to a few thousand users in the span of about 8 months. Our current top mod, Remydesp, was an active user in the subreddit in its first few months, and a lack of moderation plagued the subreddit, so he reached out to the mods offering to help out in the task of moderation,” Blank-Cheque explained.

“The biggest challenge in getting a large following was maintaining the quality of the content on the subreddit. In the next 3 months, the subreddit grew almost 200k users, and the influx of new users brought along a lot of low-quality posts,” he said and added that the community’s popularity skyrocketed after Pewdiepie made a video on it.

Since then, “we grew almost 25k users in one day. If the subreddit did not have such hardworking and committed moderators, we would not have seen the success we have today,” Blank-Cheque said. Today, the community is thriving with 1.8M members who love rare insults.

When asked why, according to them, so many people are tempted to curse, swear, or insult each other, the mod said that the question seems more complex than it actually is. “Cursing has been observed by scientists to alleviate pain, and insult-like gestures have been observed by researchers even in chimpanzees.”

Just like for chimpanzees, Blank-Cheque believes that “[Insults] are a part of life, and a world without them would be extremely different to ours to a degree which cannot be simply explained.”