If You Can’t Wed It, Reddit
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #175. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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A tongue-in-cheek but also painfully earnest look at pop culture and anything else that deserves to be ridiculed while at the same time regarded with the utmost respect. It is written by Matt Marrone and emailed to Stu Horvath and David Shimomura, who add any typos or factual errors that might appear within.
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Last month, I took in a game at The Big A, home of the Los Angeles Angels.
It was personally significant in two ways. 1. Most notably, it was my 30th lifetime MLB ballpark. 2. Less impressive, but fun, I realized later that my trip there means I have now seen a home game for every team on which my childhood baseball hero, Dave Winfield, played.
When I realized the second part of this and breathlessly told my wife about it, she didn’t even bother to feign interest.
“Why don’t you tell Reddit about it?” she helpfully suggested.
“I’m telling WEDDIT,” I responded, thinking myself clever.
But my wife’s snark contained an element of truth: Reddit seems to actually care when no one else does. Reddit, the one social media site left on the internet that doesn’t make me sick, feels truly welcoming. No doubt it has its pockets of nastiness, but it’s not wholly overcome by cruelty (see: Twitter) or phoniness (see: Instagram, TikTok) or naively spreading misinformation and then arguing about it with friends and family (see: Facebook).
No, Reddit is a place where people who share niche interests can actually enjoy them without fear of being ripped for asking earnest newbie questions, where commenters make fun of each other in good spirit – often leading to long threads of riffing – and where bots actually make you laugh.
As I sit down to write this, Reddit has just had one of its finest moments: Sleuths have finally solved the years-long mystery of “Everybody Knows That” – an unknown ’80s-sounding song snippet that inspired thousands to form a community, scouring the web for clues about its origins and sharing theories. The fact that the song turned out to be from a porno, the clip chopped out in between moans, only makes the discovery sweeter.
All this being said, I decided to take my wife’s advice. I posted the first two graphs of this column into a new Reddit thread on r/mlb this morning and then went to the gym. By the time I was done working out, there were dozens of comments and upvotes, both from those impressed by my ballpark count and others seconding my love for Winfield or naming their own childhood favorites.
Within hours, those upvotes had surpassed 300 and there were more than 200 comments. I haven’t read every response, but none of the ones I’ve seen were anything less than other nerds geeking out on my theme. I admitted in my original post that my “accomplishment” was both minor and esoteric. I left myself vulnerable, open to being teased. That hasn’t happened. Instead, others like me came together. You know, as social media was intended.
I’m not saying I would have gotten a different reaction on other social media sites. I’m just saying that, once again, I spent time on Reddit and didn’t feel like shit after. There was no doom-scrolling, no clenching my teeth to stop from responding to morons, no swiping away misleading memes, no sifting through despicable comments and lamely blocking deplorables.
Best of all, I found validation – both in my baseball fitness and my social media preferences.
When my wife didn’t care, Reddit did.
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Matt Marrone is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.
