How ‘Snark’ Subreddits Took Over Family Vlogging
Lola used to love watching the LaBrant family’s vlogs on YouTube. Clicking through the channel, which has 12.9 million subscribers, she especially liked seeing the mother-daughter relationship between Savannah LaBrant and her eldest daughter, Everleigh. But a few years in, her feelings began to change. She started to worry the LaBrant kids were being overexposed online — and then, when the family posted a YouTube video which featured what she found to be a misleading title and thumbnail image, Lola, who asked to have her name changed for this story, turned on the family. She considered them to be exploiting their kids through monetized content, but she still wanted to discuss their content. So she went to Reddit, where a subreddit dedicated to the LaBrant family has 44,000 anonymous posters who convene to snark on their every move Lola became a regular poster, checking in on the community daily. (The LaBrant channel did not respond to a request for comment.)
Lola is far from alone. As viewers grapple with complex questions related to the ethical quandaries of featuring minor children in monetized content which tracks their daily lives, the tide seems to be turning against family vloggers. Advocates question if children can meaningfully consent to appearing in the content and point to the lack of regulation for child influencers (only three states have laws related to child influencers).
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Amid the backlash, snark subreddits — communities on reddit dedicated to gossiping about specific influencers — are flourishing. For erstwhile fans, it’s a place to continue to interact with their former favorite creators but through a new, more critical lens — though, sometimes, these posters seem almost more dedicated to the subject of their ire than positive fans do. This way, they don’t have to stop viewing the content just because family vloggers have fallen out of favor. For the vloggers themselves, depending on whom you ask, the subreddits are either pitiful yet innocuous, or a dark hole that affects their mental health in ways they can’t fully bring themselves to discuss. “Reddit is truly such a dark place for me and fucks me up so bad,” one family creator tells Rolling Stone. “I honestly don’t know if I can even talk about it.”
Another family creator who runs a popular account dedicated to motherhood content, and asked to have her name withheld from this story for fear of harassment, says that she finds the snark subreddit which discusses her — and the vitriol the people on there seem to have for her — disturbing on the deepest level. “[It] legitimately puts me in a state of fight or flight,” she says. “People are waiting in the wings for any opportunity to twist you into something that makes you feel ashamed and embarrassed.”
Other creators have harsher words for those on the forums, like Kevin Franke, who dismisses the nearly 60,000 subscribers who gather to snark on his family on r/8passengersnark as “pitiful.” Franke is the patriarch of the Franke family, whose former YouTube channel 8passengers established them as vlogging royalty, with 2.3 million subscribers. That channel was removed from YouTube after allegations surfaced against Franke’s estranged wife, Ruby Franke, who later pleaded guilty to four counts of second-degree felony child abuse and is facing up to 60 years in prison. While Kevin sees snarkers as pitiful, Ruby’s arrest was clarifying for the subreddit’s mission to expose the family, with r/8passengerssnark becoming the biggest family vlogging subreddit so far to have their suspicions confirmed.
Though he has little patience for the family vlogging industry — he tells Rolling Stone that he’s “[declaring] war on all exploitation of children through social media” — he says he feels pity for the people who spend time on the subreddit dedicated to snarking on his family. Snark communities, Franke says, are largely meaningless echo chambers where commenters spend their time digging for information to cancel the influencers they used to follow. “It’s these disgruntled former fans that gather and have almost a group therapy session,” Franke says. “If that does something for them, great. I have pity on these individuals that so many of them have to continue hashing and rehashing meaningless narratives that don’t really matter.”
But if you’re spending your time screenshotting someone’s content and watching their videos and posting in a community dedicated to them, can you really consider yourself a former fan? In a world where views mean money for the influencers, snarkers sometime endeavor to watch through services that don’t contribute to views but it’s more common for the sentiment to be that giving them views is equivalent to taking one for the team in the effort to expose them. Jess Rauchberg, an assistant professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University who studies inequalities in the influencer industry, suggests that those on the subreddits are “anti-fans.”
“Reddit is truly such a dark place for me and fucks me up so bad,” says one creator whose content has been the target of snark.
“Like a fan, anti-fans are still consuming this media, but not because it brings them pleasure,” Rauchberg says. “Instead, they’re interested in looking at these media figures because they dislike them. They’re drawn because of this disgust or this distaste or this annoyance, or — in some cases, but not all — hatred.” In her research, she’s noticed that while snark community members embrace “the art of hating,” they also consider themselves to be doing something deeper. They see snark as an opportunity to meaningfully critique influencers who have social capital, and sometimes, effect actual change. In an essay co-authored with Jess Maddox, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, the authors cite snarkers taking credit for de-platforming Liv Schmidt, a popular influencer who they considered to be sharing pro-anorexia content on TikTok. “In this way, snark should not be simplified to idle gossip: it reveals the ongoing negotiation of credibility between influencers and their audiences,” Rauchberg and Maddox wrote.
“[Snarking] feels like a way to be a voice for the kids,” says one Reddit poster.
This sense of purpose is especially prevalent in snark subreddits dedicated to family vloggers. There’s the feeling that participants are not haters talking shit, but people who are dedicated to spreading what they see as the truth about family influencers. One 40-year-old snarker who asked to stay anonymous because of her participation in the forums says that she was a fan until she realized the extent to which her favorite family influencer’s content was staged. “I started wondering how many takes it took to get the perfect photo, and notice how in all the pictures of her kids laughing, you could see her hand tickling them and I never noticed it before,” she says. “I didn’t know how I missed it for so long. [Snarking] feels like a way to be a voice for the kids. I check it almost every day.” Another 20-year-old snarker, who also asked to be anonymous, says it’s not drama or hate that motivates her — it’s a desire for change in the family vlogging industry. “What they’re doing to their kids is so upsetting and should not be legal. They publicize and monetize their children’s memories and childhoods,” she said. “No amount of money, discomfort, or exploitation would have been worth exchanging my normal childhood.”
Though snarkers say they are fighting for the privacy of the children of influencers, they can sometimes fall into the same bad patterns that they critique. Most of these subreddits have rules like bans on discussing the appearances of children — or in some cases, even posting their faces — and are attempting to address what they see as the exploitation of the children involved. But much of their content, too, revolves around the kids: who is treated like a third parent, who is given special treatment, who hasn’t received proper medical care. Though snarkers generally believe that the children of family vloggers are over-exposed, they can’t seem to stop themselves from contributing to the problem.
A moderator of one snark sub tells Rolling Stone she sometimes feels guilty about the information that’s released on the platform, which once included a spoiler of a highly-anticipated baby name. “I think what it comes down to is none of us feel they should be making their living on the backs of their kids,” the mod said. By releasing the baby’s name, the mod team figured they were taking an opportunity for monetization (and exploitation) away from the family. And any content they’re snarking about already exists in monetized form; while she doesn’t think they’re furthering the exploitation, she does think about what the children themselves may think. “I’d say what we do is something that the kids could have feelings about someday,” she said. “That’s tricky.” The mod pointed to what she sees as meaningful work the subreddit has done, like hosting an Ask me Anything session with an online crimes investigator who answered questions about the possible dangers of posting children on social media.
On the path from fan to snarker, there is sometimes a catalyzing event, like in the cases of many participants of r/8passengersnark who joined when Ruby Franke was arrested for child abuse. “I joined because of the drama surrounding her,” explained one 23-year-old poster, who likewise asked to remain anonymous because of her participation in a snark subreddit. Now, she checks the subreddit daily. For other snarkers, there’s not one precipitating moment but a slow slide — like a 19-year-old anonymous poster who used to love the way a vlogging family shared their life but eventually started feeling uncomfortable with the filmed pranks they pulled on their children. “I joined these subs to keep up with what they’re doing,” she says, before clarifying “but not in a supportive way.” Another snarker puts it simply: “I’m a snarky person, and I don’t like child exploitation.”
One of the targets of a snark subreddit, who asked to remain anonymous so as not to cause a flurry of new posts, sees it differently. “I think they were all fans at one point,” the creator says. “Then all of a sudden family vlogs aren’t the cool thing anymore and so they still want to follow them. They still want to be fans, they still want to know what they’re doing, but now they’re doing the rebellious way.”
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