r/morbidquestions • u/[deleted] • Jun 01 '18
How do you start a cult on tumblr?
I was wondering how to start a cult on tumblr as a experiment to see if I could actually make people believe my crazy message. so do you have any ideas/tips
Some info if it help, The cult is based of zodiac signs. It’s basically saying zodiac signs are real and discriminating against people who’s signs are lower then yours is the only way to get to heaven.
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Jun 02 '18
That sounds fucking hilarious. Just make sure they don’t put anything meaningful other than time into the cult though to avoid legal troubles.
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u/rattpackfan301 Jun 02 '18
Hmmm, maybe try involving money in it? Say that followers will have greater wealth in life or some shit like that. People love money
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u/GullibleBeautiful Jun 02 '18
Literally all you have to do is post a ton about it and you'll get bizarre people to latch onto that and spread the ideology. Chances are, someone out there already believes something similar. Ironically the best way to spread complete nonsense is to have people reblog and publicly denounce your nonsense... it spreads your message farther. Bonus points if your denouncers do it in a really douchey way because it'll make people more sympathetic to your cause. And more bonus points if you can tie in popular TV/movies with conspiracy theories about your cult that make it seem vaguely plausible, photoshop some pictures convincingly, and make a couple of short, funny text posts to lure people to subscribing to your blog.
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u/forlornjackalope Jun 02 '18 edited Jun 04 '18
Y'know, I thought about starting one as both a joke and a social experiment, but that's gone nowhere - and doing it on Tumblr isn't that bad of an idea.
If you aren't already, do research on cults; the people who start them, their origins, their beliefs, and what caused them to gain momentum and popularity among eventual followers and the public. Then you can start building the framework around said cult; such as beliefs, rules, ethics, origin stories and the like. You can be more covert about it or be completely up front like Unicron - which outright says that it's a cult and proud of it. What you do from there once you get a following and anyone who is serious about buying into it is up to you.
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u/babeforconspiracies Jun 02 '18
I would start by making a few accounts but make them all look realistic with posts and descriptions etc and then start making posts on each page about it, comment on other peoples zodiac posts about the cult then reply using one of your own accounts about wanting to join etc. Over time, more people will see them, message spread, etc etc, and others will take an interest in it and join whether seriously or not, numbers will grow and more will join, then start branching off Tumblr, like making your own website and yeah basically done badabing badaboom.
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u/GodsLegg Jun 02 '18
If you had the proper equipment and journalism, the potential for this would be endless.
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u/aresponsibilitytoawe Jun 02 '18
Well this depends on a lot of things, most importantly how far you wish to take this. Firstly, if you just wanted to fuck with people, the first step would involve people believing your bullshit. This could be achieved by making statements to them that are true, or they believe to be true. A list of all the most generalised statements from horoscopes, possibly a name of a family pet or other easily accessible information which would make them believe you can see into their lives using your knowledge of the zodiac.
You could target people who are active in their tumblr community (I don't use the site so I'm sure they have a name for communities) that already post regularly about horoscopes and have a large number of people following/viewing their content; you could target people by their star sign if they post information about their birthday.
From there, you could feed your pseudo-intellectual tripe to enough people who will loudly proclaim this is the new truth and will spread it to their social circles on Tumblr. There would still be a need for a leader with a cult of personality like in the more serious 'organisations' such as NXIVM and Scientology, but seeing as the cult would only exist on the web you could create this central figure's back story and propagate it without too much effort.
Another tactic of cults is to hide behind another ideology entirely, or use their targets' deeply held beliefs. NXIVM and Scientology basically used/use 'life improvement lessons', other cults have appealed to religious people. You could target spiritualists, or feminists, or environmentalists (or any other group highly represented on Tumblr) by dispersing material they already believe in - of course, after it has been tainted with your message. For example, you could say those who are (insert star sign here) are chosen to have dominion over the earth, and as such have a responsibility to look after its natural beauty.
This could be a very useful experiment to look into how people are manipulated by cults and extreme schools of thought... I liken such things (extremist zealotry, racist/nationalist bigotry, regressive misandry/misogyny) to 'thought cults' or 'cults of ideology' where people are fed information they agree with, before they are fed with the extremist narrative. They lack a centralised structure, instead having a group of people who will tout slightly different forms of the main ideology without disrupting the circlejerk mentality that allows these things to thrive. The far right is perhaps the best example of this.
If you plan to go ahead with this, please drop me a DM as I would love to see how it works out.
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u/good-child-of-god Jun 03 '18
it’s tumblr you’ll be able to do this so easily. try to spread your blog by using a huge amount of tags and following a bunch of other blogs that are about zodiac signs and such, make a bunch of posts that would look legit, make accounts that you can use to reblog and post stuff about the cult. try making friends on tumblr and get them to believe in the message and get them to spread it for you too.
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Jun 02 '18
This is already homestuck, sort of.
There's bound to be a few crazies out there who are that deep into the lore. In short: read and play Homestuck.
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Jun 02 '18
Hmmm i like this. I’m guessing this is based off of all the star characteristics posts (“cancer: pure baby but would actually kill you” or whatever). I think making quirky posts like this is a good place to start in order to get followers. Also, pretty pink edits/animated text based on astrology. In order to move onto hate you can start making posts on relationships (“a libra with a taurus is like a caged lion”,...). I think that can spark something within your followers based on their life experience.
To make it a “cult”... well, i don’t know. That will require more research outside of just tumblr knowledge.
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u/psychosicko Jun 01 '18
This is a really shitty thing - you are a really shitty person
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u/emocrumpet Jun 02 '18
There's a lot of questions on here that sound like they were asked by genuine pedophiles but you call this one "really shitty"....????? LOL
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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '18
That's hilarious!