Water Niggas / Hydro Homies

About

/r/WaterNiggas is a subreddit focused on memes about water. The subreddit was inspired by a post on /r/4PanelCringe and quickly gained over 250,000 subscribers in less than a year. After being quarantined in April 2019, a second subreddit /r/HydroHomies was created.

History

On June 22nd, 2018, Redditor @medievalism^[1] posted an image to /r/4panelcringe in which a young boy says "It was just water nigga." The post gained over 12,000 points (shown below). There is a watermark to Instagram user @David_kidgalaxy_, though that account is not active as of April 11th, 2019.

The same day, a subreddit was created by user fingermilk,^[2] and the first post was a repost of the 4panelcringe post.^[3] Over the following nine months, the subreddit grew to 258,000 subscribers as users posted memes exaggerating the greatness of water. Typical subreddit jokes include championing reusable water bottles and depicting water as superior to soda.^[4] On March 17th, 2019, user JoeyJelly1^[5] reposted a tweet by @Karalela to the subreddit, gaining over 33,000 points (shown below). This may have been the post that helped the subreddit grow exponentially popular, as it also gained over 3,900 points on /r/BestOfReports.^[6]

Many of the most popular posts on the subreddit came after that date. For example, the top post on the subreddit as of April 11th, 2019, is a petition to use reusable water bottles, posted April 10th by IvyTheGreat01 and gaining over 53,000 points^[7] (shown below, left). The next top post is a Spongebob Squarepants meme posted by EpicBongoSolo on April 8th that gained over 40,000 points^[8] (shown below, right).

Quarantine

On April 19th, 2019, /r/waterniggas was quarantined by Reddit moderators for what was deemed shocking and offensive content.^[9] As of April 22nd, they remain quarantined. This led the subreddit to go private for a short period of time.^[10] In the interim, other subs imitating the original began appearing and gaining followers, such as /r/HydroHomies,^[11] which quickly gained over 46,000 subscribers in two days. After the subreddit stopped being private, posters began making jokes about the situation. User gordane13 gained over 940 points with their post making fun of Reddit (shown below, left). Another by bastekthegreat gained over 490 points (shown below, right).

HydroHomies

The same day, Redditor evanc1411 created the /r/HydroHomies subreddit, which gathered over 406,000 members in the next three months. Members posted typical r/waterniggas hydration-based images to the subreddit. April 20th, 2019, Redditor ZachEzek posted an image about the r/waterniggas ban to r/Hydrohomies^[14] which gained over 15,900 points (99% upvoted) in three months (shown below, left). On May 3rd, 2019, Redditor jhosef845 posted an Ah shit, here we go again image to r/Hydrohomies^[15] and gained over 6,400 points (99% upvoted) in two months (shown below, right).

On June 25th, Urban Dictionary^[12] user MrSnazzyGoose defined HydroHomies as "Homies who stay hydrated." That month a clean water charity titled "HydroHomies in Remembrance of W.N."^[13] raised $60 by is closing on June 30. On July 23rd, Redditor SpoonArmy posted a TikTok video and captioned it, "Hydrohomies when they run out of water" (shown below). The post gained over 200 points (99% upvoted) that day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References