Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

We're conditioning a culture to be hypersensitive, and at the same time, for some of them, hyperaggressive. Lack of experience has always clouded the vision of humans, but many find themselves, willingly or not, living within silos and echo chambers, which reinforce their beliefs and behaviors. What they consider trauma does not begin to approach yours.

In other times, their vocal ignorant statements would be squashed immediately upon utterance. In these times, they receive reinforcement, from some.

> The Upvoted story never materialized; Reddit administrators were still digging out from under a deluge of drama including revelations about online harassment from its former CEO Yishan Wong and the sudden departure of current CEO Ellen Pao. With no job, Allam spent the next six months crafting the following cover letter and applying to jobs. In February, Ohanian’s advice paid off. Allam, better known on Reddit as gallowboob, had landed a full-time executive gig with the United Kingdom-based media company UNILAD. He got the job thanks to his Reddit prowess. > > ...Allam is a social media executive at UNILAD, an online media organization that “amassed a Facebook following of over 12 million fans, 30 million monthly unique visitors to the website and over 1 billion video views a month,” states the company on its site.

> Both of these things can be true at once!

I've been on both sides of this. Last year, /r/portland began using the word 'criddler' to describe people in various states of meth-addiction and bicycle thievery.

The word was beginning to be used very often to disparage many different types of people. The moderators made a decision to ban it, and the community backlash was supreme. I let the mods have it as well.

After a few months, I came to terms with the label of 'criddler' and realized how it would come up in my mind as a form of negative judgement on a person that was not healthy for me. I realized their decision was a good one, and I described this turn around in my nomination thread running for moderator.

Your description of the situation with the police is apt and I have thought similarly many times. Most people have no idea what day-to-day police work is.

If it was possible to see the challenge of dealing with keeping the peace there would likely be more compassion for people when mistakes are made or there's anger about moderator decisions that affect the community.

I only use Hacker News and Reddit. And I always manage to get banned every few months, so I guess I'm a "bad actor".

Usually I start off OK. I can rank up 1000 points on HN or 20k karma on Reddit quickly because some of the discussions are interesting and non-inflammatory and I have interesting things to say.

But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned.

It is hard to detect because I think anyone has potential to become a bad actor in the eyes of a mod. There is no such thing as an unbiased mod. They will rub some people the wrong way with their comments or actions.

Some personality type's are just not compatible with what mods want to see in their well-tended gardens. I've never stalked or hounded anyone, and I've disagreed with dang's assessment of my posts once or twice, (FYI DanG is a paid mod, not a volunteer, which is probably why he's so calm about it, even though he get's riled too: read the New Yorker article about him) but this appears to be a problem techies cannot solve. Why do I say this? Because it's been going on since the 80's with Usenet. Almost 40 years of trolls, and tech hasn't solved it, but it has created some systems that have worked to keep the weeds out of the gardens. But gardens still need weeding.