Mao vs. LandChads: Deconstructing Reddit's War On Landlords

It’s not often that everyone on the web can agree that a community or even a person is objectively evil. Whether the focus is set on a politician doing something controversial or an A-list actor caught in a scandal, you can always find someone that’s ready, if not eager, to defend the figure against the onslaught of mainstream and social media criticism they’re receiving. One group that seemed to get nothing but universal criticism until recently is landlords — and who doesn't have a bad landlord story, right?

Online hatred for landlords stepped further into the limelight last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Stories and posts began emerging of tenants being threatened with evictions for being unable to pay their rent after being laid off. Landlords weren’t too happy about the situation either, as some states disallowed landlords from making evictions, but that didn't stop all of them, leading to even more criticism.

This isn’t where landlord criticism starts though. Landlord hatred was inherited by the web naturally after decades of hatred in real life. In 2018, Rhik Samadder published an article on The Guardian criticizing landlords as social parasites, writing about how giving a landlord a “best of” award in his field is like “giving Stalin a humanitarian award.” Back in 2010, a landlord company in Toronto was awarded a golden cockroach award by the community’s tenants association, inspiring applause from some tenants. But the root of landlord criticism, at least when it comes to online discourse, goes back to 1948.

Historically, the largest “revolt” against landlords was the Chinese Land Reform Movement, a campaign in which the communist party of China’s leader at the time, Mao Zedong, allowed the killing of over 800,000 landlords based on their class status in order to give the land back to the people. This event, as inhumane as it is, has formed the basis for a lot of anti-landlord memes today. If there’s an argument about landlords going on somewhere on the web, its’ not long before a leftist “Mao poster” enters the mix with a meme referencing the Chinese Land Reform Movement, often insinuating that it should happen again to some degree.

Similar tactics are used by right-wing posters and trolls every day, using something extreme like a tragedy to provoke reactions from the other side. Discourse like this often drowns out any actual attempts to educate either side on the pros and cons of land-lording. Instead, it melts everything down into a political flame war that branches out far beyond landlords vs. tenants to communism vs. capitalism. One of the best examples of this can be seen on Reddit.

On October 18th, 2019, /r/LandLordLove, named ironically, was launched specifically to criticize landlords. On a typical day, the subreddit’s frontpage offers a collection of anti-landlord memes, news stories highlighting bad landlords and stories of personal experiences with awful landlords. With over 37,000 members, the subreddit sees consistent interaction and posts. It’s a tightly knit community, and like most spaces on Reddit, is a bit of an echo chamber because of it; a safe-space for landlord criticism. You’re not going to find many debates on whether or not landlords really deserve this blanket-stated criticism they’re awarded on the sub, and the posters seem content with it, able to focus all their energy on sharing anti-landlord efforts rather than engaging in flame wars as many of them do on other online spaces just for their outspoken left-wing opinions.

Besides, many of the posts speak for themselves, offering quick glimpses into how landlords can abuse their power (albeit without looking at the landlord’s side). The idea of a landlord, someone who literally "lords over your land," comes with an assumed power imbalance that’s easy to apply to every landlord thanks to the lack of context needed to post on the web. In some cases, this power imbalance is definitely there, but research is required. Of course, if you’re going to criticize something vehemently on the web without exploring all sides, you have to expect some opposition. That opposition came on May 3rd last year in the form of /r/LoveForLandlords, a subreddit specifically made to combat /r/LandLordLove.

With over 34,000 members, /r/LoveForLandlords is just behind in followers as opposed to /r/LandLordLove, offering a pretty fair battle. The landscape on /r/LoveForLandlords is a lot different than their enemy sub. /r/LoveForLandlords is a straight-up meme-fest, filled with mountains of ironic and post-ironic memes to the degree that it’s impossible to tell what’s serious and what’s not. The about section of the sub claims that the board is meant for landlords to discuss their problems with tenants, but there’s very little of that going on. Instead, the followers of the sub perform somewhat of a roleplay, where they post pretending to be exaggeratedly evil landlords who are ready to jump on any means they can to evict their tenants.

Memes on the subreddit frequently feature posts bragging about all the money they’re making from tenants, boasting about kicking tenants out during bad times in their lives and asking elaborate questions in order to find out how they can finesse their tenants into homelessness. The subreddit even has its own language, including words like “rentoid” to describe tenants who pay but the landlord still wants to kick out for being annoying, and “Landchad” to describe landlords who stand up for themselves and other landlords. It’s almost immediately evident that the subreddit is created just to troll landlord haters online, specifically /r/LandLordLove, and they don’t hide it. Posts are frequently made bashing the subreddit, just as posts are frequently made bashing /r/LoveForLandlords on the other sub. Recently, the sub seems to be concentrating its efforts on surpassing /r/LandLordLove in members, and the divide is only getting closer.

Admittedly, /r/LoveForLandlords is a lot more fun to browse through from an outsider's perspective due to the unique memes. They may be an even more tight-knit community than their counterpart, albeit in memes rather than hatred. In contrast, the sub has also devolved into nonsense. Beyond the heavy political undertones that live beneath almost every post, there’s not much substance here, with users making variations of the same joke over and over in their own opposite-yet-equal echo chamber. While /r/LandLordLove is a space where actual grievances about landlords get aired out, nothing of much substance is ever discussed on /r/LoveForLandlords. Their memes are stronger, but their intentions are weaker and equally without evidence. They could post positive landlord stories and help the cause, but instead, they meme.

Most people won’t leave the subreddit with a genuine love of landlords, as there are no reasons given to love them. /r/LandlordLove users, on the other hand, post more than just memes of varying degrees of irony to their page, offering actual evidence for their hatred. It’s not as fun of a sub, sure, and it’s not as active, but there’s nothing fun about the fight against landlords to them.

This is why the users see /r/LoveForLandlords as such a harmful subreddit. It delegitimizes their war against landlords without any necessary context thanks to the nearly equal follower numbers and the fact that more right-leaning trolls, whether they like landlords or not, will jump in the sub and start posting just as another excuse to troll leftists in a brand-new way. It reduces the entire problem to the core politics that may or may not be at the center of the posts on /r/LandLordLove, when in fact, a lot of the users are posting about genuine legal problems they’re having with landlords, muddling the point entirely. When your whole online community is defined by Mao-posting though, what do you expect?

At the end of the day, it all comes back to the memes. Although Mao-posting isn’t rampant on /r/LandLordLove, it is popular when it happens. It’s the most extreme posts that tend to get the most upvotes, and the same goes for /r/LoveForLandlords when they roleplay as evil landlords. /r/LoveForLandlords has gained a significant fanbase by reducing the critical landlord community’s image on Reddit to that of a hateful communist protestor and Mao-poster, reducing them to a combatable level and opening them up for retaliation from right-leaning trolls far and wide. In each case, extremism is both communities’ greatest weapon and weakness, and it’s the reason neither matters in the grand scheme of things.

/r/Landlord was created in 2008. It boasts over 47,000 members and is a space for landlords and tenants to come together and post about anything related to landlording. The moderators actively ban trolls and discourage nonsense after being raided before, and offer a place for landlords to talk both professionally and more casually.

Browsing through the posts lets you see a more human side of the argument. One of the top posts on the site comes from a landlord suspending rent due to COVID-19, receiving praise in the comments for representing landlords positively. Like many things, the reality behind Reddit’s landlord war is a lot more grey than what's represented. It’s more fun and tempting for a lot of people to take a side and get extreme, but it doesn’t really help anyone’s point. There are absolutely problems with landlording, but they go a lot deeper than internet trolls dwell.

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