What are some stories from another online community you frequent(ed)?

There was one, a political community that had some (small) notoriety. It was an awful place. The people there would judge your worth on whether you were a long-time familiar contributor or by the number of posts you made. Like, you could be a former President and post there and they would call your opinion shit because you didnt have a high post count. Anyway, the place was shit and everyone there was shit. So I decided to mess with it.

They had a system where if someone mad a post that violated the rules, you could flag it. They had a jury system on whether a comment broke the rules and the results of that jury would be made known when the voting was done. People logged in and on the site would get a notification to participate in the jury and add their comments (anonymously) with their vote.

I knew the fissures on the site so I did my best to exploit them out of frustration. I would flag posts for the most minor of violations and would flag the discussions once the votes were made and people talked about it in the admin/mod area.

Also, this site was notorious for thinking people were moles/trolls from competing sites. I would find people having a debate and send a message to each saying I was sure the other was a mole sent from the other site to infiltrate. I made a few fake accounts saying I was the spouse of a user and disagreed with my spouse politically, but they and their friends from the other site had made a plan to infiltrate the site and ruin it.

I was in college at the time and had a computer lab to myself and thus the IPs were different. It was a great time and my actions ended up causing the site to implement new rules for posting comments and new posts--also the admin/mod page (where people botched about the site and where I did most of my flagging) was made private.

It was petty and dumb, but they pissed me off. Anyway, I ended up causing the site to administer new rules to stop disruptive behavior and it basically killed the site for new users (the waiting time for making an initial post, and for making new posts, comments caused the new user traffic to die).

that and I used to be a wikipedia vandal back in the very early days of wikipedia. I had my own moniker and everything. One funny note is that I got some classmates bad grads because I knew they would use wkipedia for their assignment so I changed the article full of fake stuff. This was very early in the wiki days so you could get away with it.

/r/AskReddit Thread