To find out more about Reddit’s powerhouse, Bored Panda reached out to the Bone Apple Tea subreddit’s moderator team who were happy to share some insights about the community. “It's been a pretty steady progression since we started,” the moderators said and added that “I don't think any of us expected to hit 1 million.” After 5 years from its creation, the subreddit has reached a solid 1M member count, but its audience is likely to continue soaring.
But there’s definitely a lot of work when it comes to keeping Bone Apple Tea’s content entertaining and making sure the community is constantly active. Turns out the moderator team has recently taken on a batch of new mods to help run the subreddit, as well as have a few bots running around to weed out misspellings.
“We have a list of banned words that are reposted at least 25 times a day—if we allowed them, our sub would be nothing but the same 5 malapropisms. By keeping the list, we try to ensure that there is enough variety for people to keep coming back,” they told us.
Part of the success of Bone Apple Tea revolves around its whole concept that so many people find universally funny. The moderator team believes that “The English language in general is pretty funny—It's like it was designed specifically to confuse everyone.”
Moreover, “Malapropisms are in that niche where even if you are completely fluent in English, you still run the risk of using the wrong word and looking like a fool,” they said and added that “maybe people just want reassurance that they aren't alone.”
When asked about the future of the Bone Apple Tea community, the mod team said that they have created 2 new subs to deal with scenarios that allow homophones and typos, r/BoneAppleTee and r/BoneAppleTypo respectively. Turns out, the rules at the original Bone Apple Tea are pretty strict and they don’t allow any of these there. “We hope that they will grow to the same size as r/BoneAppleTea someday,” they said.
