45 Times People Thought They Were Being Very Smart But Ended Up Looking Like Complete Idiots

However, getting things right most of the time wasn't good enough to meet the moderators' standards for quality. They wanted to be right all the time when it came to posts not revealing any identifying information, as per the subreddit's very first rule. "There should, ideally, be no way for a user to see a post on our sub and use that post to find the person in that post. This means that all real names, phone numbers, addresses, usernames, online community names, Twitter handles, etc., have to be redacted from the post before submitting it. There's no way a bot can guarantee that to happen. As such, we found ourselves in the position of having several posts live in the feed that contained that information, which some people then used to track down and harass the VerySmart(TM) person."

Thumbs0fDestiny was very candid about the situation: they'd let down Reddit's standards, r/IAmVerySmart's standards, as well as society's standards. "So we had to put a stop to it. The only way to make sure that didn't happen was to put the sub on full lockdown. All new posts are automatically filtered into a moderation queue where they sit until a human volunteer checks them to be sure there aren't any rule violations. This change has mostly been behind the scenes and therefore largely unnoticed by the community, except to say new posts now arrive on the sub in batches when a moderator is clearing the queue, where before they would trickle in one at a time. The change had the desired effect, though. We've not received a single complaint about harassment from anyone since we instituted the new policy."

Which posts were your fave ones, dear Pandas? Do you plan on becoming a member of r/IAmVerySmart? Do you know anyone in person who tries way too hard to look smart? Share your thoughts and drop us a line or two in the comment section below.