Bored Panda got in touch with redditor u/YaBoiPotatoDestroyer, who is currently the one maintaining the subreddit and guarding it from, in their own words, “spam, bad posts, and repetitive reposts”. They shared that they became a moderator a couple of years ago, together with a fellow redditor that is no longer using the platform.
Nowadays, u/YaBoiPotatoDestroyer is the only one responsible for ‘They Knew’. “I wanted to mod for the community because I like the subreddit and I love moderating since I've previously been a mod for r/S**tPostCrusaders,” they said.
The moderator told Bored Panda a little about the subreddit’s history. “A Reddit user, whose name I don’t know, had the concept that became ‘They Knew’. The user itself and the mods at the time were just maintaining the subreddit as it slowly grew, until one day PewDiePie made a video on the subreddit reacting to its content.”
“The subreddit gained a massive popularity boost and the modteam even thanked PewDiePie for reviewing the subreddit in which, if I recall correctly, the mod said that they were quite overwhelmed with how popular the subreddit became and that they didn't quite know how to handle the subreddit from there on out. I assume the mod team was kinda dead at that point already.”
The redditor added that the moderator team and maintenance declined so hard, there was only one user remaining. “Even the main creator of the subreddit left for reasons I don’t know,” they said.
That one user wasn’t interested in keeping up with the maintenance of ‘They Knew’ and was looking for people to take it over; and that’s how u/YaBoiPotatoDestroyer got to the position they are in today. They told Bored Panda that they’re planning to take more matters into their hands and to create a new moderator team to take good care of the subreddit.
“What I like the most about the subreddit are the new creative ways to find inappropriate messages that make you say: ‘They Knew’,” the moderator said.
“This subreddit is pretty much used for comedy content and I suppose it's also beneficial if you can use the images on a project where you’d normally have a hard time finding what you were looking for.”
The collection of pictures found in the ‘They Knew’ subreddit is clearly a colorful one. It boasts all kinds of unexpected sightings, from bizarre church billboard graphics to peculiar-looking ads, and everything in between, which poses the questions—what do they have in common and why are they funny?
What connects the images is the fact that the people responsible for whatever is depicted in them must have known exactly what they were doing. And it’s likely that they’ve arranged things in a peculiar way, creating certain juxtapositions or incongruity that we find funny.
Incongruity theory is one of the three theories of humor (together with approaches based on superiority and relief). It is based on the factor of surprise typically in the form of unexpected outcomes or punchlines that seem incompatible with the situation. That might be one of the reasons ‘They Knew’ community members start giggling when they see a rather naughty-looking sign on the door of a family friendly store and similar images.
According to The Conversation, the second one, based on superiority, is believed to be the oldest theory of humor out of the three. (Philosophers Aristotle and Plato arguably alluded to the idea thousands of years ago.) This approach accentuates the misfortunes of others, making their inferiority the butt of the joke. The third one, known as the relief theory, is built on releasing certain built-up tension through humor and laughing, especially at jokes related to taboo topics.