Hilarious Moments When An Attempt Was Made, But It Didn’t Go Planned

We were curious to get the moderator’s opinion as to why r/therewasanattempt has been as successful as it is. “Pertaining to the success of the community, I think it really came down to the shear flexibility of the topic,” u/F4T4-M0RG4N4 told the interviewer. “Across the globe, there are constant instances of attempts which go horribly (and funnily) wrong. r/therewasanattempt is a subreddit that brings these moments in time to one place,” they said.

We were very interested in learning more about what it’s like to moderate on Reddit. We were given a look of the backstage action by user u/F4T4-M0RG4N4. “When working as a moderator, the time you spend volunteering hours depends on your position and what you’ve established. If you are a top mod, you can expect more time to be used modding,” they explained that how time-intensive the job is will heavily depend on where in the hierarchy you fall.

“As far as how difficult it is to mod, I think it is difficult starting out, but you quickly get the hang of things! The more you participate, the more you can make decisions that are generally well received,” the mod told us.

“When I initially joined r/therewasanattempt, I think the other two mods added me due to me being generally active in other communities. But subreddits are constantly opening mod applications which is the best way to show interest in the position,” u/F4T4-M0RG4N4 said that the best way to become a moderator yourself is to just go for it and apply.

According to u/F4T4-M0RG4N4, moving on from incredibly embarrassing moments in life comes down to realizing that these things happen to everyone. “It’s best to acknowledge that and laugh about it with friends in the future.”

The ‘There Was An Attempt’ subreddit has carved out a sizeable niche for itself since its founding in the late summer of 2015. It’ll be celebrating its 7th birthday in just a few weeks’ time. It just goes to show that quality humor and a good meme format go a long way when it comes to laying the groundwork for a flourishing online community.

If you’re planning on being an active member of the community, then any posts you make have to show unsuccessful attempts. There’s no room for victory on r/therewasanattempt, nope.

Meanwhile, every single post has to follow the same format that everyone else uses. The title that you use ought to be a continuation of the phrase, ‘There was an attempt…’, and then you just fill in the rest with what someone tried and failed to do.

The team running the subreddit explains it all in detail right over here. If you don’t follow this rule, your post will end up being removed, so don’t let others miss out on your awesome content just because you forgot how to word the title properly.

My colleagues and one of the subreddit’s numerous moderators, redditor u/F4T4-M0RG4N4, previously discussed the subreddit. They claim that what distinguishes r/therewasanattempt from other subreddits is “the fact that posts within the subreddit are typically direct posts, in contrast to r/fail, [for example], which has mostly links to YouTube, and most Redditors prefer to stay on Reddit rather than to be redirected to another site entirely.”

“Besides, I also think that because of the size of r/therewasanattempt, it’s a lot easier to get a post to be seen (plus, the algorithm helps).”

The crew in charge of everything behind the scenes makes excursions to maintain their objectivity. They favour letting the community’s members reshape the subreddit as they see appropriate.

“The most common problems are [the same that are] seen throughout all subreddits that I mod/have modded in the past, but it’s mostly spam and hate speech (which we always remove), though hate speech is mostly in the comments,” mod u/F4T4-M0RG4N4 said.

“As for the community of the subreddit, I don’t think I could really summarize it. This is another thing I see throughout most subreddits, but the communities are made up of many different people, with different stances on ideas and different personalities. That’s also what I love about Reddit, everyone is on here using the platform, be it for better or worse, you get a little bit of everything,” they shared with us.

According to the redditor, people really enjoy the slapstick comedy element of the sub. “At the end of the day, everyone is laughing,” u/F4T4-M0RG4N4 said.

“When I first joined the team, it was mostly a screenshot sub,” they told Bored Panda that after some drama about how there were only three moderators keeping things in check, they invited more people to join the team. They also removed the screenshot posts.

Very recently, Bored Panda spoke about embracing failure and how to react to embarrassment with Suzanne Degges White, Ph.D, a Licensed Counselor and a Professor at Northern Illinois University.

“A sense of humor and flexibility are key traits to successful adulthood and being able to laugh at our missteps allows us to go easy on ourselves when we do something potentially embarrassing,” she told us.

“No one hates to “lose face,” and different cultures have different degrees of ingrained attitudes around this. We might make more out of something no one else really observed and no one else will remember afterwards, the professor said, adding that our brains may be particularly prone to catastrophizing occurrences.

“For decades, magazines have been publishing those ‘Boy! Was my Face Red!’ type of columns where people shared their embarrassing moments. When we are able to ‘get it off our chest,’ we actually feel better about the event. That’s a healthy response to an embarrassing moment. When our personalities are wired to feel that we must be ‘perfect’ in all that we do, we internalize negative feelings about the mistake we made and mistakenly assume that everyone else is judging us due to that one moment,” she said.