When Kim Kardashian tried to break the internet in November, it was still still recovering from being broken a few months prior. Beginning on 31 Aug 2014 and lasting a few weeks, the internet was hit with an event that became known as the Fappening, a portmanteau of happening and fap, internet slang for masturbate.

Ignition was triggered when these two posts of naked photos of Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton were submitted to their respective subreddits. Within minutes they were both on the frontpage of /r/all, with everyone wanting to know where the pictures came from. It soon became known that someone had hacked the iCloud where a large number of celebrities had stored private nude photos of themselves. Unperturbed by this breach of privacy, people demanded more. And more they received.

Within the next few hours of the initial 2 posts, several other nude celebrity photos, including Kirsten Dunst, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kaley Cuoco, Yvonne Strahovski, much more Jennifer Lawrence and many others were posted to reddit. Eventually, someone decided to name this event, and so it was dubbed The Fappening. The deleted comment in that link said there should be a subreddit for it, and the follow up by /u/johnsmcjohn was to let people know that he’d created it.

The subreddit exploded instantly. In all of reddit’s history, no subreddit has ever come close to being as initially popular as /r/thefappening. With the first 24 hours, it amassed 100,000 subscribers. As it happened over the weekend, it bough an influx of people who weren’t at work to the site. An influx that led to 141 million page views in one day. That is roughly what /r/AskReddit gets in a month.

Over the next week, more naked photos (mostly of Jennifer Lawrence) kept getting posted. The site was continually going down because of the massive amount of traffic from all across the web. Discussion started popping up in threads all over the site about the morality of the event, whether it was stealing or not, and talks on invasion of privacy, pleas for Emma Watson photos, and random accusations of reddit’s hypocrisy. Eventually, the admins posted this. Very soon after, /r/thefappening is banned. Mirror subreddits pop up in droves instantly, and are all smited faster than they can be made. The next day, /u/alienth steps in. Any chance of /r/thefappening being reopened is quashed. The admins quickly face a gargantuan amount of backlash due to accusation of censorship and only blocking unfavourable content when it makes reddit look bad in the media. The admins adopt a very diplomatic stance, taking care not to upset people more, but it only angers the horde more as the answers they want never come.

Over the next week, people still try to hold onto hope that there will be another resurgence, and reddit got their wish. On Sep 20, a second batch of photos was released on 4chan, and then posted to reddit before they were quickly removed from the hosting sites. More photos followed in the days to follow, but as with all things, reddit slowly drifted its attention toward other things and The Fappening faded into the background, a memory of mixed feelings for the masses.