I Took The 50/50 Challenge On Reddit And Saw A Serious Crime The Cops Should Be Investigating
I don’t consider myself a Redditor, but one of my favorite Youtubers made a video about the 50/50 challenge so I had to check it out myself.
Basically, the page contains links with two options, one good, one bad. It’ll say something like Kitten playing with a giant ball of yarn / Man with half his face blown off. Or maybe something like Maggots crawling out of a dead woman’s leg / Hot girl sucking cock. It’s usually sex or violence. Tits or throat cutting.
If you’re brave enough, you can click the link and you’ll either see the good thing or the bad thing. You have a fifty-fifty shot, hence the name.
It’s stupid, yeah, but it’s fun. Educational when something gruesome happens that I never knew the body could handle. And good masturbation material when it turns out to be porn.
But the other week, I saw something I’d never come across before. A link that said: A video of you in the past / A video of you in the future.
It stuck out to me, because it was so different. Because I had no idea what it was going to show me.
A fuzzy video popped up, poor quality, caught from a street camera. A skinny guy in a red jacket was feeding his credit card to a machine at the gas station when four men surrounded him.
One shoved him against the side of his truck. Another knocked him in the jaw, three times, until he tumbled to the ground. Another kicked him in the ribs, again and again until he crumpled into a mess of broken bones and hot blood.
As if that wasn’t enough, the last one whipped out a folding knife, flipped it open, and jammed it through the victim’s neck, killing him. It had to have killed him, there was no surviving that.
The video cut off as the men walked off. Jumped to a black screen.
It took me a second to click away, to register what I had just seen and decide that I needed to research the username to figure out how the hell they got ahold of that video.
Because that guy in the red jacket, the guy getting the shit kicked out of him, was me.
It had happened about a year earlier, almost to the day. I’d been on my way home from a one-night stand and stopped to fill up my tank so I didn’t have to do it the next morning before work. While I was inserting my card, fully focused on the screen in front of me, a group of three men had started harassing me, yelling slurs.
I’d ignored them, head down, wishing the damn machine would speed up so I could get back in my car.
But before that could happen, I’d heard a thump. Someone had slammed my driver’s door shut and shoved me. As a group, taking turns, they knocked me to the ground. Kicked my ribs. Bloodied my lips. Broke my nose.
But that’s the thing. There were only three guys, not four. And there weren’t any weapons involved, only fists. The scene was almost accurate, but not quite. There was no way it was a coincidence though, because it was too close.
I figured whoever had filmed the video was one of my friends. That they had created it to fuck with me. Before I dropped out of university, I had been a film student, taking classes with future directors and cameramen, so it could have been anyone.
I’d told that story, of getting mugged, about a million times. At every party. At every water cooler. To get a conversation going or make girls feel pity for me to raise my chances of sleeping with them.
I had explained everything, down to the part about wearing a red jacket. One that I still owned and still wore to remind myself that I was strong enough to recover from whatever life threw at me.
When I clicked on the username to research the guy, PsychicPsychotic, there was nothing else listed where his history of comments and uploads were supposed to be. The person had never created any other posts. Just the one.
That meant it had to be one of my friends. They created a fake account so I couldn’t trace it back to them. Assholes.
I texted the most likely suspects, testing their responses, but no one acted guilty. No one seemed to be laughing behind my back and no one straight up asked if they’d scared me.
I even made a Facebook post about it to lure the offender out, writing,“What kind of ‘friend’ would make a fake film about my mugging LOL? Hope it at least got you some college credit #FuckYou”
I hoped the person who created it would see it and claim ownership for the attention, but all anyone did was complain that the link to the video was broken. And when I tried to drag the pointer back to the start and replay, it wouldn’t work. The screen stayed black.
Three weeks went by, but no one admitted to posting the damn thing. I’d even tried messaging the Reddit user directly, but I received an error message announcing that their account had been deleted.
Honestly, I didn’t make any more attempts to track the guy down. I had pretty much eased the incident from my mind, because what else was there to do? I couldn’t drop all my friends, because one of them decided to be a douche. I had to keep living my life. Keep doing what I always did.
And the next thing I did was pretty damn stupid.
Maybe I was too stubborn to drive over to another town to pump my gas when there was a station three blocks from my house, or maybe I was just plain stupid, but I ended up back at the same gas station where I had been mugged, wearing the same jacket I had been mugged in, when I heard a group of voices overlapping each other in their excitement.
“Hey, look who’s back on his feet.”
“Hope you have more cash on you than last time.”
“On the ground, fucker.”
The first guy knocked me in the jaw. Once. Twice. Three times. While I was down, blood already creeping into my mouth, another one kicked me in the ribs with steel-toed boots until he heard cracking.
It felt like last time. Just like last time…
Except there was a new man, a fourth man. Without breaking eye contact, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a slice of metal. When he flipped it open to reveal the blade, that’s when I remembered the wording of the 50/50 challenge. That’s when I realized I’d forgotten about the other option.
The video wasn’t a clip from my past. It was from my future.
I should’ve taken that as a hint to turn, twist, try to protect my neck. But all I did was flinch, waiting for the knife to pierce my skin.
Reddit 50/50
Reddit 50/50 was a series of videos showing Jack reacting to Reddit’s FiftyFifty subreddit.
Format [ ]
People are presented with a thread with the option of two images or videos: one contains horrifying or inappropriate imagery, the other innocent. Some of them are highlighted as either ‘Safe For Work’ (SFW) or ‘Not Suitable For Work’ (NSFW) or both. Most of the images or videos are actually real.
Reddit 50 50 что это
Posted on Dec 21, 2016 Updated on Feb 3, 2021, 1:55 pm CST
Are you feeling lucky? Are you bold enough to click on a totally random link? Reddit’s favorite game is suddenly experiencing a huge resurgence, with some of the biggest YouTube stars taking part. If you haven’t taken the Reddit 50/50 challenge yet, you probably will soon. Here’s what you need to know.
What is Reddit 50/50?
The premise of Reddit 50/50 (or Reddit FiftyFifty, Reddit 50 50, or 50/50 Reddit ) is incredibly simple. Users submit a link to an image or video that will either give you the feels and/or reaffirm your faith in humanity, or it will gross you out/scar you for life/make you not want to live on this planet anymore. The accompanying headline presents you with accurate descriptions of both possible outcomes. The name “FiftyFifty” is an obvious reference to your odds of getting either outcome. A flip of the digital coin will either give you something awesome or something truly awful.
The rules are fairly simple for submissions. The titles have to start with [50/50] and have to have “clear and separate titles,” making the two options clear. You can’t link to any illegal content—there are limits here, no one wants to stumble upon child porn—and there are a number of forbidden Reddit 5050 themes, including “fake celebrity nudes that do not specify that they are fake,” “screamers,” lame set-ups like heads or tails, and importantly, “trans/gay content used as the discouraging content.” Each post must also be NSFW or SFW, short for not safe for work or safe for work, though some are NSFL (not safe for life). And you should probably heed that warning because they tend to fall on the side of the grotesque. We can’t stress that enough.
READ MORE:
- The surprisingly safe-for-work history of porn memes
- Unpacking The_Donald, the internet’s pro-Trump bunker
- Reddit’s best Tinder pick-up lines
The importance of having a positive and negative possibility is made clear in an admin post from September 2017, and don’t even think about trying to sneak in some self-promotion. “ Your shitty YouTube channel doesn’t count,” admin PlushSandyoso wrote in a September 2017 update . “I will permanently ban you without mercy.”
The trick is to make both options so enticing or curious that just can’t help but click—consequences be damned. Here are just a couple of sample headlines. (Warning: Some of these links may contain material not suited for a public environment and may ruin your day, which is kinda the point.)
Jason Reed
What is a true 50/50?
R/FiftyFifty, the home for all of these challenges on Reddit, gives the submitter the option of picking which outcome any would-be players get. Alternatively, users also can make their post a “true FiftyFifty.” When that happens, the submitter posts both potential outcomes, but they don’t know what will happen when people click on that link. It’s randomly selected, and users will be stuck with their choice for 60 seconds—and that minute will feel like a lifetime. True FiftyFifty scenarios are labeled with “True” flare. Anything that involves porn or spoilers are automatically labeled True 5050. If you want to only see True5050 posts, you should click here.
Here’s one example:
If you only want to look at True5050 posts, you can find them here . And if you’re worried about accidentally clicking on some NSFW content, you can adjust your Reddit settings here. You’ll just need to adjust your settings to “high images for NSFW/18+ content” while also confirming that you are, in fact, over 18 and “willing to view adult content.” You’ll need to save for the changes to stick.
Who created Reddit 50/50?
Reddit FiftyFifty first came into existence nearly four years ago, on Jan. 3, 2013. It was born out of the necessity to find something to amuse oneself when properly sauced.
“As a drinking game, I was hunting around for some risky clicks,” topodan, the original redditor behind the madness, told the Daily Dot in an August 2013. “After this proved [to be] difficult, I loaded two links into a tab, one from r/wtf [a subreddit for bizarre images and stories] and one from r/aww [a subreddit for all things cute and cuddly]. I would tell [my girlfriend] the two titles and make her guess which one it was.”
Topodan has since deleted his Reddit account, but that hasn’t stopped the community from growing exponentially. As of this writing, it boasts more than 586,000 subscribers. The subreddit is currently the 127th most popular community on Reddit and has been in the social news site’s top 200 subreddits since April 2013. It saw a massive spike in January 2018, gaining more than 1,000 subscribers in one day.
Reddit Metrics
READ MORE:
The best of Reddit 50/50
It’s hard to pick a personal favorite of the many Reddit 50/50s we’ve tried, especially considering how many new ones are added every week. but here are a few safe-for-work ones that you play at work or dare a co-worker to click on.
That wasn’t so bad, was it?
Why is the 50/50 challenge so popular?
Although it’s been around for years, Reddit FiftyFifty, or as it’s sometimes known the Reddit challenge, has seen a resurgence in popularity as of late thanks in large part to several prominent YouTubers filming themselves playing the game.
Markiplier did the Reddit 50/50 challenge in November—to much success, we should add. Its accrued nearly 6 million views to date, making it the most popular video on the subject on YouTube.
PewDiePie also did it back in June 2017 to significantly less success. There are a few other good examples out there as well. Here’s one from Mini Ladd that went viral in December 2017:
Some channels have even done the Reddit 50/50 challenge on numerous occasions. SourceFed has put out at least 10 videos over the course of the last two years. Similarly, Steven Suptic has seven videos playing the game. It’s easy to see why: Watching other people react to the digital coin toss is as much—if not, more—fun as doing it yourself.
The Fine Bros. actually devoted two episodes of its series to the Reddit 50/50 challenge, and both have over 1 million views.
Screengrab via FBE/YouTube
I guess misery really does love company.
Reddit 50/50’s enduring legacy
As an interactive subreddit, Reddit 50/50 remains relevant and influential. Its very nature challenged Reddit’s discussion structure, having berthed lots of subreddits where visitors don’t necessarily engage with a post as if it’s a topic of discussion.
Screengrab via FBE/YouTube
Indeed the more things change, the more they stay the same. In 2021, the setup is still straightforward and the game unaltered: “50/50] A pic of the New York skyline at sunset (SFW) | A toe cut in half by an axe (NSFW)” posits one recent post. The Reddit 50/50 challenge reminds us all that if the internet is a place, we all live in a noisy row home just off the freeway. The dark underbelly is always creeping, just hidden underneath, and we yearn to see it.
Want to know more about Reddit? Here are some fascinating facts about the site’s history , celebrity Reddit users to keep an eye out for, the truth about Reddit Gold , and the best of Reddit’s Shower Thoughts .
Editor’s note: This article is regularly updated for relevance.
Reddit 50/50
A well-known subreddit where all the images have the "spoiler" tag by default. Above each post is a description of two things that you may see if you click the image. (The website chooses which one it will be at random.)One of them is typically quite pleasant, while the other is. not so pleasant.
For example, you may see a 50/50 where one of the possible posts is a bunch of kittens sleeping in a box, while the other option is a man waking up from anesthesia while undergoing open-heart surgery. (This is just an example. But the bad outcome is not an exaggeration; some of them are actually very graphic and utterly terrifying.)
. You get the idea. This subreddit can either make your day, or it can scar you for life.
Reddit 50/50
Reddit 50/50 cured my depression
Person 1: Hey man did you go on Reddit 50/50?
Person 2: Yea man, I'm no longer playing games!