There was a kid, maybe 14 or 15 who complained about his mum and sister in r/parentsarefuckingstupid or a similar sub. He didn’t mention being autistic in the post but it was pretty clear - it was his behaviour and response which was inappropriate, not his mum’s. Having grown up with an autistic brother his reaction was very familiar to me. I tried to give him some tips to help him avoid conflict and smooth the situation over - “apologise even if you don’t mean it right now, it’s the easiest way of getting your game back tonight. In future don’t raise your voice to your sister even if she’s shouting. Remove yourself to your bedroom to calm down. Ask to speak to your mum alone to explain your side of the argument. Etc” pretty benign advice that wasn’t judgemental or insulting in anyway. I put a decent amount of time into writing my response in a way that was constructive and helpful from his perspective. I felt pretty good about myself afterwards, like I’d done my good deed for the day.

The kid went absolutely psycho. He was writing comments and immediately deleting them, then saying I was sending him extremely inappropriate sexual messages. He was summoning all the bots he could think of, like the n-word bot to accuse me of racism (I’ve never ever used the n-word). It was so out of left field I was stunned. A couple of people stuck up for me in the comments but it left me really shaken. Who the fuck accuses someone of being a racist pedophile out of nowhere? That boy needs help and it has nothing to do with his autism.

The detoriation of the subreddits. Lots of subreddits, especially now, are not good moderated so very low effort posts, lots of reposts and toxic comments being rampant.

Gosh sometimes people disagreed with me. That was horrible!

wallstreetbets post-gme era. That sub was a gem.

Told my experience with a brand from when I worked as a wholesale Buyer for a retail chain. A person that was not part of the original conversation picks a fight, is a combative asshole that looks like any other user, logs in as a mod and permanently bans me. It’s the only time I’ve ever been banned. Reporting him did nothing even though he had a long list of abuse in his history.

Well, on reddit, I was only ever banned from one community, that being /r/worldnews.

And I got banned because there were hours old comments by users there basically stating it was a good thing that old people were dying from covid. They were downvoted, but still, not enough, and no one had the guts to say it so I did: I told them that they were plaguespreaders and a blight on humanity, and should improve it by killing themselves, and the fact they weren’t already banned was a gigantic shame for the website.

Which I stand by.

The mods then banned me (after I got like 50 upvotes in a couple minutes proving people paid attention to the comments but didn’t realize how nefarious they were) but… didn’t ban the other users. That is until I complained about it elsewhere and basically highlighted how terrible the mods of that subreddit are. THEN they got banned.

They still didn’t unban me and I wear that ban with pride. I am 100% aware that I triggered an automated ban on myself. Which is, actually, the de facto bad experience I bring to the table: One of the largest subreddits, filled with nothing but “”“powermods”“”, is being left completely unmoderated and easily free to be astroturfed by coordinated bad actors. This is effectively the same as being tolerant of them

My one political stance on social media is no one should ever be allowed to moderate more than 3 communities.

There used to be a button to visit a random subreddit that I liked to use, until the day that I landed on the sub unironically dedicated to beating your wife/girlfriend. I saw one or two fucked up posts before I fully processed what I was looking at, that I don’t even feel comfortable detailing here because I would hate to trigger someone. Truly one of the darkest corners of the internet.

This is similar to other threads we’ve had in the past week. Removing under rule #4.