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.
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.
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.