The ‘Disney Vacation’ subreddit was born out of a huge fanbase for weirdly captivating WikiHow illustrations that are “weird, terrible, and terrifying” all at once. What makes them even more entertaining are the ingenious and comical captions that give them an entirely new meaning.
We reached out to the main moderator of the community named Xalaxis, who shared some insights on the content on ‘Disney Vacation’ and the community behind it. “So we started off 2021 with about 590k subscribers. We passed the 600k milestone in April and are now at around 610k. Whilst growth has definitely slowed, it's crazy thinking that only three years ago we were just celebrating 50k.” Xalaxis said that they're definitely not worried about having too few members with such an amount of growth.
Right now, the mod team is debating whether the 'political posts' rule needs to be expanded. But other than that, “the rules and content have remained the same since our last talk,” Xalaxis said, referring to an earlier interview with Bored Panda. “It seems we've struck on a good set of guidelines,” the moderator added.
According to Xalaxis, “at the risk of sounding like some sort of 'WikiHow historian,' I think we've definitely seen a shift in the sort of content that they've been putting out recently.” They added: “We've been seeing a lot less of the traced/clearly weird illustrations like our first-ever post, and a lot more of illustrations which are well-drawn but strange even in context, such as number 3 in your list, although we've still been seeing the occasionally just badly drawn one like number 16 on your list.”
The moderator believes that such a combination of strange topics and weird illustrations will keep WikiHow a topic for memes for some time to come. “We get a wide range of submissions, generally focused on highlighting the oddities in an image, but occasionally also referencing current events to create a narrative. The vast majority of posts that get removed from the subreddit are purely because they forget to include the link to the source article.”
Moreover, in order to get one's submitted post past the mod team, people have to answer the most popular question seen on /r/disneyvacation, "What on earth is this an illustration for?!?" “The rest are removed because they either break our rules on political posts or are grossly unfunny (we do allow WikiHow's more NSFW illustrations, but some people think that 'disgusting = funny.' We at least make sure people put in some effort into the title,” the mod concluded.
