“Make Me Suffer”: 40 Of The Most Painful Images Posted By This Online Community

Bored Panda spoke to the moderators, u/hwhouston517, u/LovelyAGQ, u/DeathAngel11, and u/MattShea of the subreddit. Turns out, the subreddit was created by MattShea, a popular gaming YouTuber with over 2 million subscribers.

“It was originally intended for his YouTube series titled 'Make Me Suffer' for a place for his subscribers to submit posts that would 'hurt' to look at. The subreddit gained thousands of subscribers in the days after its creation, mainly being a place for memes and comics intended to make you disgusted or in shock (but not too extreme),” the mods told us.

The creator of the subreddit, MattShea, recounted: “One day I decided to make a video on an old flash game called 'Duck Life' which for some reason ended up being a very popular video. For obvious reasons, I followed it up with some more videos on the sequels, and made some jokes about how I was only doing it for the viewers. One of them said they were happy to 'make Matt suffer' so one day I decided to invite my viewers to post links and images in my Discord server of things that would 'make me suffer.' After a while, using Discord for the series become impractical, and I wanted to see how things would go if I gave people the opportunity to vote on what they deemed 'sufferworthy' or things they wanted to see me react to.”

This is when MattShea realized it’d be great to create something to reach people outside his niche, so the subreddit was born. “I designed the subreddit to be largely independent of myself, so people wouldn't say 'hmm, I don't know this person so I don't want to be a part of this' when coming across the sub. After my viewers got things moving, the rest was history,” he told us.

As time went on, the subreddit strayed from its original purpose and users started posting irrelevant content. The mod u/LovelyAGQ recounted: “At the time, I had noticed that a lot of posts that didn't really fit had started popping up, and a lot of posts from fellow users poking fun at and complaining about how often repetitive, ill-fitting memes would get posted.”

At the same time, the subreddit was starting to explode with popularity, and Matt, not having enough time to manage the subreddit by himself due to his YouTuber career, added more mods to help the subreddit maintain its quality. “As the sub grew even more popular and as Matt focused less and less on the subreddit, the subreddit slowly strayed from being about him and his YouTube channel, to being about the users and posting what makes you suffer the most,” u/hwhouston517 remembered.

The mod u/hwhouston517 was added as a sub moderator along with a batch of others. In 2019, the subreddit had around 300,000 members then, and was exploding in popularity, gaining 50k new members every month. In comparison, today Make Me Suffer has a solid 1M members and is a constantly growing community with a lot of exciting—meaning compelling, but hard to look at—content.

The moderator team is a close-knit community with great and devoted people, u/hwhouston517 said. “As a moderator of some other large subreddits, I can definitely say I am closer to no other mod team than this one, everyone here is great and I love all of them, the mod said and added that: “We've had our ups and downs of course, but this is by far the most chill mod team I'm part of. We're also part of a very diverse team, more than half our active mods being LGBT+ and even having a couple transgender mods on board.”