July 20, 2018
By Maven Road
Reddit had a historical moment a few weeks ago, as the “r/ThanosDidNothingWrong” randomly annihilated nearly half of its accounts (nearly 300,000). This is the exact same strategy Thanos used in the popular film “Avengers: Infinity War” in order to bring back balance to the universe.
A couple of hours before this massive ban, thousands of Reddit users decided to join the subreddit in order to get ousted. Yes, that’s no typo: they WANTED to get banned.
This event began making waves on social media a week before the event, when Josh Brolin, the actor that played Thanos in the film, recorded a video for the Redditors. “Here we go Reddit users!”, said Brolin, followed by a quick snap of his fingers. This is a reference to Thanos, when he wipes half of the beings in the universe out of existence during the third act of the highly-acclaimed blockbuster. This tweet gained more than 2K retweets and boosted Brolin’s mentions from 0 to 3K during the month of June.
— Russo Brothers (@Russo_Brothers) July 8, 2018
On Monday 9th, more than 2.5 million people watched the colossal ban as the Reddit Twitch account streamed the occurrence in real time. At one point, there were over 40,000 users watching it at once!
Watch ^_^ from Reddit on www.twitch.tv
In order for the subreddit followers to come back to life, they were asked to subscribe to “r/inthesoulstone”. This is based on the theory of some die hard fans that anyone who “died” at the end of “Infinity War” was actually transported into Thanos’ Soul Gem. Anthony Russo, the Infinity War co-director, was one of the “banned”. Curiously, though, Joe, Anthony’s brother and “Infinity War“ director survived, proving that balance has indeed been achieved.
Approximately 553K members still remain subbed in “ThanosDidNothingWrong”, while banned users are expected to unsubscribe themselves, honoring the deal. On the other hand, InTheSoulStone has amassed 230K members.
On July 9th, The-Jedi-Apprentice posted “*SNAP* THE BAN HAS BEGUN.” This post received more than 87,000 points (88% upvoted) and 57,000 comments in 24 hours. That same day, Marvel Studios tweeted a gif of Thanos saying: “Perfectly balanced.” The post received more than 3,200 retweets and 18,000 likes in 24 hours and the official Marvel handle reached nearly 2k mentions.
It’s essential to understand the dynamics of game-changing events, such as this massive ban, in order to learn how audiences can transform a seemingly small event into something huge!
Perfectly balanced.https://t.co/hVsgHOhDX5 pic.twitter.com/LLqKHiHyom
— Marvel Studios (@MarvelStudios) July 10, 2018
Maven Road
A global business intelligence firm focused on creating lean, actionable consumer and audience intelligence. Our knowledge and expertise allows our customers to reach new pockets of consumer data that would otherwise remain untapped. Our Big Data, Machine Learning Models and Advanced Analytics help global brands stay ahead of the market.