Reddit is experiencing a nationwide outage that has taken down the app and website. Thousands of users have reported error messages and comments disappearing from the site.
I used to be quite proud of myself for never blocking anyone on Reddit, ever. Also I was a mod of a couple of gaming subs, so it wouldn’t have worked in those anyway:-). But eventually I realized… it wasn’t helping my state of mind, and rather it was affecting my irl relationships too. So I stepped back from modding, and finally blocked a particularly onerous troll account that I did not want to ban as a mod, but I sure did enjoy blocking him as a normal user.:-)
There’s a saying about the only thing we must not tolerate is intolerance, and it doesn’t quite go far enough imho as to state the consequences of failing to block intolerance - that they drag us down to become more like them:-(.
and finally blocked a particularly onerous troll account that I did not want to ban as a mod, but I sure did enjoy blocking him as a normal user.:-)
Just for curiosity, what was the troll doing?
I got a few of them from my Reddit mod times too, but since I was moderating smaller subs I had some freedom to tweak the rules towards their behaviour. (Because if I’m getting annoyed by the troll, odds are that other members are too.)
Standard troll (like toddler) stuff: pushing boundaries to see just exactly how far they could go, while stopping just inside the stated rules.
The reason I didn’t ban him is that his trolling was directed almost solely at me as the mod, but to the rest of the community he was actually quite helpful, and even somewhat kind 95% of the time. Some kind of problem with authority I suppose, even though I’d previously offered him my mod position but he turned it down.
We all have bad seasons in life, and I shudder to think what he went through during the pandemic. Not that it matters bc behavior is always a choice - Hitler’s home life surely wasn’t fantastic either - but by way of explanation, I do wonder how much the pandemic encouraged trolling on the internet world-wide (most likely: it simply became the latest in a very long like of reasons). And anyway, he was definitely this way before that started, so at best it would be an exaggerating factor.
He seemed good at masking behaviors, thus overall he was better for the community than he was annoying. And it was a small community (at least among regular posters) to begin with. And I was getting super annoyed by the game itself, and by Reddit, so rather than kick him out I stepped down as mod (I had been training someone already, and a prior mod returned from before the pandemic, so it was in good hands) and left the sub myself instead, and now there’s “peace” over there:-).
Urgh, the complicated type. When the user is just plain bad you ban them, when the user is mostly good you leave them alone, but when it’s mixed this way no matter what you do you feel like you did the wrong thing.
I get why you simply blocked him though - it feels sensible in this case.
I do wonder how much the pandemic encouraged trolling on the internet world-wide
My granny would say that “an empty mind is the Devil’s workshop”. I think that’s the case with the pandemics, a lot of people were stuck at home with too little to do, too little to think about.
To be honest my own troll Reddit account saw far more activity during the pandemic. (I avoided making it personal against anyone there though - I had more fun taunting whole circlejerks instead.) But by then I wasn’t a mod any more for years.
It was actually really instructive to me to watch the evolution of his antagonizing efforts towards me, as he allowed himself to get radicalized elsewhere. What is worse is that he knew better - i.e. the reason he cited to me when I offered to step down and let him take over was that he was not emotionally suited to it, but thereafter not only did he not step up, he also refused to step back, and instead inflicted his assaults upon the entire community (to the point people were making memes out of our back-and-forth exchanges, which we tried to keep to removed posts that if you recall in Reddit remained publicly-accessible for anyone that had the URL but was not shown on the feed anymore) - he wouldn’t even relegate them to our DMs, despite how we had communicated that way in the past. In part that may be b/c Reddit DMs suck ass, but also I think it was in large part theater, as he seemed to be performing for the sake of approval by some tankies on a Discord server. I continually offered them my mod position as well - b/c they had been with the game for several years and knew it exceedingly well, whereas I was a relative new-comer to it; also they were in charge of the fan wiki as well - but it seems that they had much more fun belittling my relative inexperience, yet refused to do any actual work of their own to make things better, i.e. modding.
I am sure you know about Ian Danskin’s (the guy who does Innuendo Studios) The Alt Right Playbook, but he also has a series titled “Why Are You So Angry” that perfectly describes the situation, which occurs so often among young gamers who unbeknownst to them are being radicalized, both by one another as a normal part of the young male angst, but also not entirely untouched by foreign powers who used that to literally get Trump elected and thereby benefit themselves.
And yes, then covid too, plus now the MAGA movement that took many of those principles to such great effect has expanded to include women, and somehow black and jews and LGBQI and even trans people, despite how incongruous all of that seems to anyone who pays attention to “facts”, that Trump isn’t goint to somehow change his tune and support them in return…
I used to be quite proud of myself for never blocking anyone on Reddit, ever. Also I was a mod of a couple of gaming subs, so it wouldn’t have worked in those anyway:-). But eventually I realized… it wasn’t helping my state of mind, and rather it was affecting my irl relationships too. So I stepped back from modding, and finally blocked a particularly onerous troll account that I did not want to ban as a mod, but I sure did enjoy blocking him as a normal user.:-)
There’s a saying about the only thing we must not tolerate is intolerance, and it doesn’t quite go far enough imho as to state the consequences of failing to block intolerance - that they drag us down to become more like them:-(.
Just for curiosity, what was the troll doing?
I got a few of them from my Reddit mod times too, but since I was moderating smaller subs I had some freedom to tweak the rules towards their behaviour. (Because if I’m getting annoyed by the troll, odds are that other members are too.)
Standard troll (like toddler) stuff: pushing boundaries to see just exactly how far they could go, while stopping just inside the stated rules.
The reason I didn’t ban him is that his trolling was directed almost solely at me as the mod, but to the rest of the community he was actually quite helpful, and even somewhat kind 95% of the time. Some kind of problem with authority I suppose, even though I’d previously offered him my mod position but he turned it down.
We all have bad seasons in life, and I shudder to think what he went through during the pandemic. Not that it matters bc behavior is always a choice - Hitler’s home life surely wasn’t fantastic either - but by way of explanation, I do wonder how much the pandemic encouraged trolling on the internet world-wide (most likely: it simply became the latest in a very long like of reasons). And anyway, he was definitely this way before that started, so at best it would be an exaggerating factor.
He seemed good at masking behaviors, thus overall he was better for the community than he was annoying. And it was a small community (at least among regular posters) to begin with. And I was getting super annoyed by the game itself, and by Reddit, so rather than kick him out I stepped down as mod (I had been training someone already, and a prior mod returned from before the pandemic, so it was in good hands) and left the sub myself instead, and now there’s “peace” over there:-).
Urgh, the complicated type. When the user is just plain bad you ban them, when the user is mostly good you leave them alone, but when it’s mixed this way no matter what you do you feel like you did the wrong thing.
I get why you simply blocked him though - it feels sensible in this case.
My granny would say that “an empty mind is the Devil’s workshop”. I think that’s the case with the pandemics, a lot of people were stuck at home with too little to do, too little to think about.
To be honest my own troll Reddit account saw far more activity during the pandemic. (I avoided making it personal against anyone there though - I had more fun taunting whole circlejerks instead.) But by then I wasn’t a mod any more for years.
Do you by any means speak Portuguese?
Yup. If you’re asking this due to granny’s saying, it is that old “mente vazia é oficina do diabo”.
De repente cascalho
It was actually really instructive to me to watch the evolution of his antagonizing efforts towards me, as he allowed himself to get radicalized elsewhere. What is worse is that he knew better - i.e. the reason he cited to me when I offered to step down and let him take over was that he was not emotionally suited to it, but thereafter not only did he not step up, he also refused to step back, and instead inflicted his assaults upon the entire community (to the point people were making memes out of our back-and-forth exchanges, which we tried to keep to removed posts that if you recall in Reddit remained publicly-accessible for anyone that had the URL but was not shown on the feed anymore) - he wouldn’t even relegate them to our DMs, despite how we had communicated that way in the past. In part that may be b/c Reddit DMs suck ass, but also I think it was in large part theater, as he seemed to be performing for the sake of approval by some tankies on a Discord server. I continually offered them my mod position as well - b/c they had been with the game for several years and knew it exceedingly well, whereas I was a relative new-comer to it; also they were in charge of the fan wiki as well - but it seems that they had much more fun belittling my relative inexperience, yet refused to do any actual work of their own to make things better, i.e. modding.
I am sure you know about Ian Danskin’s (the guy who does Innuendo Studios) The Alt Right Playbook, but he also has a series titled “Why Are You So Angry” that perfectly describes the situation, which occurs so often among young gamers who unbeknownst to them are being radicalized, both by one another as a normal part of the young male angst, but also not entirely untouched by foreign powers who used that to literally get Trump elected and thereby benefit themselves.
And yes, then covid too, plus now the MAGA movement that took many of those principles to such great effect has expanded to include women, and somehow black and jews and LGBQI and even trans people, despite how incongruous all of that seems to anyone who pays attention to “facts”, that Trump isn’t goint to somehow change his tune and support them in return…