Where did "We did it Reddit!" come from?

During the search for the bombers after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings, Reddit went into full witch hunt mode and basically started scanning images of the crowd looking for anyone "suspicious", seemingly defined as brown people with backpacks. /r/findbostonbomber had been created for all of this.

After one such person was found in the audience, a sequence of extrapolations was made and people came to the conclusion that the bomber must have been a man named Sunil Tripathi; someone apparently misheard and thought they heard his name on a police scanner. He hadn't been seen for weeks and family had reported him missing.

Redditors began bombarding the FBI, police, news organizations, etc. with the accusations that Tripathi was the bomber.

Tripathi however, was not the bomber. He wasn't even present at the Boston Marathon. Tripathi was actually dead, and had been dead for several weeks prior to the bombings. He had commited suicide.

So Reddit was, en masse, falsely accusing an innocent person with basically zero evidence, purely on the basis that a guy present at the Boston Marathon (who may not have been the bomber) kind of sort of looked like another guy (who had been missing for the better part of a month). Most people who commented doubts were downvoted into oblivion in /r/FindBostonBombers.

The saddest part about this whole incident was that /r/FindBostonBombers played a part in forcing the FBI to prematurely release the photos of the bombers to the public rather than to finish identifying the bombers; and quietly arresting them.

This caused the bombers to go into panic mode and to try to escape which led to the death of a MIT police officer, death of one of the bombers, the manhunt and resulting martial law lockdown of Boston.

"We did it reddit" is an ironic celebration cry to me.

/r/OutOfTheLoop Thread