An iFunny (and Substack) History
A general overview of the iFunny-Substack connection. [Jul 11, 2024]
As the iFunny diaspora has grown more popular on Substack, more and more non-iFunniers have come into contact with our posts. As a consequence, this has led to a lot of confusion on their part as they are met with this surprisingly large and continually growing clique with its own jargon and inside jokes that leave them in the dark. A number of my subscribers have asked for clarification on some of the things we take for granted as iFunniers, so this post is intended to remedy some of that, as well as a few other things. What I intend to do is:
Clarify and define some of the jargon used by iFunny.
Provide a general (non-comprehensive) overview of iFunny history, including the recent diaspora and the even more recent Banocaust.
Provide a comprehensive list of iFunniers who post on Substack, which I will try to keep updated as time goes on.
I will also update this post with feedback as necessary.
Key Terms
There are a lot of buzzwords that are iFunny-specific or take on different connotations when used by an iFunnier, so I’ll take a second to list and define them for your convenience.
Banocaust- Starting with this one since it has the most relevance, after Tuesday. “Banocaust” is a portmanteau of “ban” and “holocaust” that refers to the especially large ban waves that the iFunny mod team has historically handed out. Generally speaking these ban waves are abrupt, sweeping, and give no reason behind it. Reasons for each ban wave vary between the grievances of one or more mods, trying to appease US federal agents by removing extremist users, or trying to return iFunny to the App Store/Google Play after it was removed due to the extremist user base. There’s some debate over exactly how many Banocausts there were, with most people thinking this is only the second. That’s not actually true, with the First Banocaust taking place in 2014-2015, the Second Banocaust taking place in 2018, the Third Banocaust taking place in 2020 (this one was very brief), and the Fourth Banocaust taking place Tuesday, still ongoing. Generally speaking, when someones says “I survived the Banocaust” they are referring to the first one, as a badge of honor that indicates both their long-time use of the app and loyalty to the community. o7
Automod- A portmanteau of “automatic” and “mod/moderator” which refers to the program they use to moderate posts after they fired most of their human staff. It’s extremely sensitive and makes it very hard to get anything to post. Many posts will sit in automod purgatory for up to several days before they start getting any views. It also censors a lot of words, and there is no comprehensive list of words that it censors. Words also get censored and uncensored frequently. The word “black” used to be censored because we were so racist.
Blackholed- What happens to posts that get taken down. Comes from the “Looks like this post was eaten by a black hole” notification when trying to click on a deleted post. Most people say “Backholed” now, as a reference to Nikocado Avocado’s prolapsed anus [picture not included].
Deep iFunny- Long time users of iFunny, specifically the political/religious users. Essentially this is what the extremists on iFunny call ourselves. We are the ones that make the memes and textposts for the most part.
Feature Creatures- iFunny normiess, basically. They stick the the “featured” section (front page) for the most part and sometimes go to collective (basically just random posts from anyone). Most of them are from Instagram or Reddit and act as such. Most of them are also latinx. The only positive thing about them is that the create an insulating shield around Deep iFunny that prevents most normies from ever finding us.
Oldheads- I think most people on the internet know this term, which just generally means old people. On iFunny, this usually means someone with at least 3,000 days on the app for “true” oldheads, but its sometimes applied to the “younger” users (2,000 days or more) now that there are more sub 1,000 day accounts. Sometimes it’s also just applied to someone due to their irl age.
Nopfps- Literally just accounts with no profile picture. They have a sort of ephemeral quality on iFunny. They are really sort of the under-appreciated backbone of the app.
i- Prefix- Added to most cliques on iFunny. iPolitics is probably the most famous one, generally referring to the oldhead political posters during the Trump Administration. iTextposters is another, which refers to the users who made longform writings on iFunny (most of us have moved to Substack now though). Other miscellaneous groups are iChristian, iPagan, iSports, and iCars. These are informal classifications, though they may have associated tags where they usually post.
Textpost- An iFunny post that is mostly or entirely words, as opposed to the more typical memes. Due to technical limitations these were generally a lot shorter than Substack articles, which meant we had to get really good at condensing our thoughts. Most of these were made in iFunny’s Comic Maker, though some of us used external apps, either because we lost Comic Maker or because 3rd party apps had better/more features. MonarchTrump is probably the most famous iTextposter of all times. You really just had to be there.
Comic Maker/GIFCaps- Probably the two most well-known meme formats on iFunny. Comic Maker was originally used to make old Rage Comics and came built into the app. It had a small library of 2010 era memes, namely Rage Comics, a draw tool, and a text tool. As time went on, it became increasingly used for textposts. It was removed from iFunny and now it can only be used if you have an older version of iFunny installed, much to our chagrin. GIFCaps (GIF Captions) were exactly what the name says. They were/are some of the funniest memes on iFunny. The integrated GIFCap feature was also removed from iFunny and can only be used on older versions, although you can manually upload GIFs.
Scrollspost- A meme format pioneered by the iFunnier Elf_Cooker_Gang which is generally a blend of lore from the Elder Scrolls franchise (hence the name) and Right Wing esotericism. Other franchises have been the subject of scrolls posts (such as the one I made) but for the most part, TES is the bread and butter of these kinds of posts. Generally made with the iFunny comic maker or some similar app.
Repub- Short for “republish” which is just the restack/retweet feature of iFunny. Begging for repubs (by spamming mentions or DMs) is not uncommon. Also related are the genre of “Repub for ____” posts, often times profile rates or other gimmicks.
MLG Speak/BRAP Speak- Phrases like “bleachsoped” and “pwned” are alive and well on iFunny, as is randomly throwing in a '“BRAP” into your posts. Generally speaking, these are relics from the “offensive” era of iFunny. A lot of us continue to use the language in our textposts because we get a kick out of the juxtaposition of something like an analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy and MLG CoD speak/fart jokes. It also makes Redditors mad because they think you can’t have fun if you want to be smart or something.
Fandoms- Cliques focused on a specific fictional media franchise. Generally this is used to refer to the “undesirables” like Bronies and Furries. Technically though, the SWC (Star Wars Community) and similar groups are also fandoms, but most of these were not hated due to substantial user overlap with other groups. Real Polk oldheads know that I used to be a Star Wars Lore poster, and thus technically a “fandom” member.
Other- Incelspeak, 4Chan lingo, etc. are all popular on iFunny. Words like “fakecel” and “Gem/Coal” are very common and often get used by iFunniers on Substack. I’m not going to define them here since they don’t take on any other meaning when used by an iFunnier, but you should know this anyways. If you don’t know these words then you should probably be in a retirement home.
Brief History
The Beginning
iFunny was initially released on April 26, 2011. At this time you couldn’t make an account or comment. Gradually, more features got added to the app, and then all of them were removed because they mods are gay and need to be enslaved.
For the most part, iFunny was a pretty typical meme app for the first 4 or so years. Around 2015 a group of people who called themselves “Offensives” (basically just MLG libs pwned types) took it upon themselves to bully or banraid all the fandoms off the app. This was arguably the start of organized RW activity on the app, since these “fandoms” that were targeted were almost exclusively groups like Bronies, Furries, or fans of really gay video games like Undertale. It basically came down to bullying liberals for liking gay stuff. A lot of these types went on to join iPolitics.
iPolitics
Starting around the time Trump announced his bid for the 2016 Presidency, iPolitics came to the forefront. Around 2015-2018 is considered the iPolitics (and more broadly: iFunny) golden age. This is where textposting really took off. It’s also when most of the extremist activity took place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFunny#Extremist_incidents
A lot of the various inside jokes also took place around this time. For example: “Mike is like really strong” incident and this gem:
I’m not even going to try and mention all of them, but the comments of these iFunny posts have a few others:
Ever since 2016, election years have always been considered the peak time to be on iFunny, with Primaries usually being the best. Since then, iFunny has generally been extremely political.
Everything was largely fine until the 2020s. iFunny had some degree of automated moderation for a long time, but it still maintained a pretty large human staff of moderators who did most of the work. Sometime around 2022 that changed. They fired most of the mods and replaced them with the automod. At first it wasn’t THAT bad, but eventually it got to the point where basically every other post (even the non-racist ones) was getting banned. This was especially hard on texposters, because it seemed like any post with more than a few sentences of text was getting taken down. The worst part was the fact that the criteria for getting automoded was in flux and always changing, and there was literally zero transparency over what the criteria was.
This is what eventually led to the iFunny diaspora to Substack.
The Diaspora
Because of this discrimination against textposters, many of us started to get really fed up. It already took a long time to make a textpost, even when they were only a 3 minute read max. It often took me several hours to put it all together because I had to use several different apps to do it all since I did not have Comic Maker and also wanted my posts to be aesthetically pleasing and unique. Suffice it to say, the frequency of textposts dropped tremendously and a lot of us just sort of stopped making them entirely.
Eventually, we had enough. The Diaspora proper began when Sectionalism Archive’s review of the the Barbie movie got backholed. He already had an Oppenheimer review planned, but decided not to post it to iFunny since theBarbiereview didn’t make it. Thus, he posted it to Substack and “Sectionalism's Review of 'Oppenheimer'“ became his first Substack post on August 13, 2023. He announced this on iFunny, saying that all future textposts would probably be on Substack from now on.
This started the Diaspora. From what I can tell, me and Layne A. Jackson were the first two that started posting on here after Sectionalism, but a lot of others quickly followed. Some of them just read articles, some of them made one article then never posted another one, and some ended up posting quite a few articles. Either way, by merit or random chance me, Sectionalism, and Layne ended up becoming sort of the iFunny Substack triumvirate with the most subs out of iFunniers on Substack as well as the most articles.
This has led many to believe that Sectionalism was the first iFunnier on Substack, but this is not actually the case. He isn’t even the first iFunny author on Substack. Both of those illustrious honors actually goes to Lionel Verney who wrote his first Substack article on December 11, 2021 (almost 2 years before Sectionalism) which is titled “WARPATH: A Strategy for the Right”. Technically, my account is also older than Sectionalism’s as I first made an account to view and interact with Lionel’s posts, although I did not post anything myself until after Sectionalism. Actually I didn’t even realize I had a Substack account when I joined after Sectionalism because I sort of forgot about it after reading all of Lionel’s posts.
Anyways, for all my Substack-exclusive subscribers, this is why so many people talking about “iFunny” popped up over night with hundreds of subs. Most of us have at least a couple hundred to over a few thousand subs on iFunny so just by announcing our ‘Stack on iFunny we got a ton of subs. It’s also why we haven’t really been “playing the field” so to speak and have immediately started beefing with some of the already established people on Substack. We disagree with them ideologically and have the follower count and experience from years of banraids and brigading to effectively make ourselves heard.
The Reckoning
As I mentioned earlier, Tuesday was a new Banocaust. This one was probably the worst to date, on a relative scale. The earlier Banocausts had much higher kill counts, but they were also during the peak of iFunny’s user count so it was sort of a drop in the bucket. The app is already dying and this may very well be the end if these accounts can’t come back.
Frankly, a lot of us already had a foot out the door anyway. As you may have noticed, a lot of the iTextposters moved their content to Substack. Similarly, the big meme posters have mostly moved to large private Discord servers, and a few of them have started building platforms on Twitch and YouTube. The iFunniers who were engaged with in-person activism already use Telegram or similar services to link up with people and, generally speaking, were already in the process of leaving iFunny whether they admitted it or not. When you boil it down, most of us were prepared for this. Except there is one problem: iFunny was the only thing that united us. These huge Discord servers may be full of racist people but they don’t really care to read textposts about racism or what have you. Similarly, most of us Textposters have no desire to be in such a huge server. To be frank, I am only in them out of loyalty to my mutuals; I rarely ever do anything in their servers unless we are playing vidya.
So, unless these accounts get unbanned or can figure out a way to circumvent the ban, iFunny may end up balkanizing. Even then, many oldheads have said they have no intention of returning to the app so there will always be a void.
It does seem that things are looking up though, allegedly there are talks of peace in the Middle East… wait sorry I meant with the mod team my bad.
This was sent to Brongulus by the INSTAGRAM iFunny account very recently. I suspect this has to do with the INSANE influx of anti-mod posts in Collective. At the time of writing, about 99% of the posts there are some iteration of “mods are gay” and it’s almost entirely random nopfps. I suspect they are long time lurkers of many of the larger accounts that got banned like Sectionalism and Dronom who are upset with the Banocaust. Either way, you should respect your local nopfp for their service. o7
I am also obligated to include Mookie’s post on the matter, as he is (was, sigh) a valued mutual. It is quite self explanatory, but also perhaps turn down the volume? It ear raped me when I played it.
If you want a more personalized history, Layne A. Jackson just happened to also be writing a similar post, which he uploaded right after mine. This should give you a better idea what it really felt like on iFunny, because it really was a unique environment.
The Future
Big things are coming…. Viva la iSubstack!!!! VIVA LA IFUNNY!!!!!!!
R.I.P Deep iSubstack
Btw I will not be remaking Deep iSubstack out of fear that I will be banned again. Someone else can if they want but I fear that may draw the ire of evil, evil people.
The Reckoning (Again)
On November 15th, 2024 the iFunniers Daklr (later banned again) and
had their Substack accounts suspended.1 Several other account were also suspended, some of which made new accounts while others didn’t.Three days later, on November 18th, James Knox and Samara (now
) were also suspended. These suspension are similar to iFunny bans in that your account isn’t deleted, but you are barred from interacting with anything. So just like how can still get on iFunny and view memes, but he can’t like/repub/comment/post, we could all still view articles, we just couldn’t like/comment/post. Similarly, we no longer have access to our mailing list for our subscribers. However, we did still have access to all of our old articles which made it possible to save them.Most of the other accounts that were banned made new accounts quickly after, however I did not make a new account and just read articles. On January 8th, 2025 I made this account, initially named Young Hickory (one of Polk’s nicknames), with a picture of Aaron Burr and the publication name The Burr Papers which can still be seen in the url. I did this at first because I was worried that whatever automod that Substack uses would detect that I was using the same name for my account/publication and wanted to distance myself somewhat from any possible automod bans. As all iFunniers know, these sorts of ban waves often last days at a time and it can be unsafe to rename yourself with a similar/the same name. Regardless, either Substack never had such an automod implemented, or almost 2 months since my ban was long enough for things to cool down.
Either way I changed my account back to an almost carbon-copy of my old one within 24 hours, mainly because I saw that
was able to use the same profile with no automod ban.Anyway, myself and Samara were the two largest accounts to be banned in this ban wave, and also seemingly the last.
What Happened?
Frankly, it’s hard to say. The two main theories are that Substack did it themselves as part of an effort to clean house, or that we were all banraided.
Almost all of the people banned were iFunniers, and the only one who wasn’t was Samara, who was working close with us at the time of the ban (and had just posted an article about iFunniers).
Several of the people who were banned admitted that they probably deserved for sending certain images (backhole) to accounts they were trolling. In fact, with the exception of myself and Samara, all of the people banned were “Note Raiders” who frequently messed with Substack normies in notes. Certainly, Samara and I had engaged in this sort of behavior before, but not to any real scale. We had also never backholed anyone or sent any other similar sort of image.
For more information, see:
This leaves the question of why we were each banned.
I think it’s pretty easy to explain why I was banned: I “owned” Deep iSubstack. It was technically my publication, because I created it. So when my account was suspended, Deep iSubstack became inaccessible just like The Knox Papers. This is important, because the Deep iSubstack publication was how we iFunniers organized ourselves. It was a collection of all the posts made by iFunniers (curated personally by me) as well as the primary chat for iFunniers on Substack. Even if I didn’t engage in note raiding myself, it was where most of the note raiding was organized.
Samara is a bit more difficult to explain, but he does have a history with Substack’s administrative team, as well as several big Substack accounts. It’s not really surprising that he was banned because he already had a lot of enemies in high places, and he was closely associated with a group that was already being targeted (iFunniers).
This leaves us to the final question: banraid or “legit” mod action?
Again, it’s really quite hard to say. In the “moderation” section of our old publications we can see that many of our old comments were marked as spam. This could mean that a coordinated group of people came in and all reported our comments as spam until they triggered the automod to just ban us automatically, such as was common on iFunny.
Alternatively, this could be a byproduct of the Substack moderation team banning us. Maybe flagging comments as spam is how they suspend you (janky implementation wouldn’t be shocking). Or maybe, once you are suspended, all comments are marked as spam to ensure they are erased. We really just don’t know.
Personally, I am partial to the idea that it was a banraid that Substack retroactively sanctioned (which is why our appeals fell on deaf ears). Looking through my moderation page, the oldest flagged comments were from July 9th, 2024, when I know for a fact that I made comments on my old posts that are far older than that.
This comment was never mentioned in the moderation section. That seems to indicate, at least to me, that marking as spam is not something that the automod just does. Instead, they simply remove the comment altogether, like one would expect.
This, combined with the fact that all of the comments that were marked as spam were very clearly not spam (and many of them were just innocuous discussion of Star Wars, due to the recent Star Wars posts I had made), leads me to believe it was a banraid for at least some of us. Obviously, I grant that many of the note raiders were probably “justifiably” banned insofar as they broke TOS by sending backhole, but not all of us did that.
That leaves the question on who organized the ban raid? Was it a private group of Libtards who were seething at our White Boy Swagger? Was it one of the many other large Substack accounts we had previously beefed with? Hard to say. I don’t know, and what investigation we were conducting have since gone cold.
It was ignorant ninja
splendid!