It’s not just girls asking “Am I pretty or ugly?” on the Internet by Casey Johnston

You only need to do a bit of reddit digging to find all of the insecure guys.

A sampling of posts from the Am I Ugly? subreddit.

r/amiugly

The Internet has disseminated its fair share of concerns about insecure teen girls who are asking “am I pretty or ugly?” to possibly the last audience they should be consulting (the ever-hostile ranks of YouTube commenters). But a new examination of reddit by PsychGuides shows that teen boys aren’t immune to appearance-related anxiety. They’ve just found a different place to express them: in subreddits.

According to PsychGuides, four out of five submissions to the r/amiugly subreddit are by a male redditor, and the average age is between 18 and 19. In this subreddit, users post photos of themselves for open critique of the 35,000 subreddit subscribers and any passers-by who have thoughts.

But while men constitute most of the submissions, women make up most of the responders: 62 percent of the responses to submissions were made by female redditors 18 and under. Female submissions also get the most responses at an average of 54 replies per submission compared to male submitters’ average of 14 replies.

There is another reddit, r/amisexy, where men dominate the scene slightly less, at 62 percent of submissions to women’s 38 percent. The crowd that wants to know if it is sexy also skews a couple of years older, sexiness being a slightly more adult concern than ugliness. Either way, if you’re an insecure teen so in need of validation that you’ll risk the drive-by cruelty of Internet commenters, you always have reddit as a YouTube alternative.