Y'all Can't Behave

About

Y'all Can't Behave is a phrase often associated with Reddit moderators who use the statement as a reason for locking the comments of a post, indicating that commenters broke the rules of the subreddit.

Origin

The earliest known notableusage of a phrase of this like comes from March 2, 2017 on Twitter, where user @KoofiDonJon Tweeted "Pizza is cancelled for the rest of the year since y'all don't know how to behave" in response to a viral post from another user bout their enjoyment of dunking their pizza in milk(shown below). To date this tweet has 164k likes and 95.5k retweets

There is no known origin to this phrase and its association with reddit mods locking threads. However usage dates as back as
September 28, 2017, with a comment by Reddit mod u/italia06823834 on a /r/lotr post titled "Samwise helping Patton Oswald take the chicken nuggets to the fires of Mount Doom.".^[3] The comment is shown below.

Spread

Through 2018, the phrase's prevalence and notoriety would spread. On April 13, 2018, redditor /u/PM-ME-GOOD-DOGGOS posted a comment disparaging moderators who used the phrase as opposed to "doing their jobs".^[4] And on April 21st, 2019, r/whitepeoplegifs mod /u/bobcobble posted "Y'all can't behave so we've had to lock this thread." before locking a Reddit post.^[5]
On April 13th, 2019, the /r/YallCantBehave^[1] subreddit was launched. On August 15th, Redditor OnlyTheForum submitted a post titled "I'm gonna lock this post cuz yall can't behave" to the /r/DecreasinglyVerbose^[2] subreddit.

Search Interest

External References