Comment by hightrix
6 days ago
This practice was perfected by gallowboob years ago.
He would spam a link/pic/post and monitor, if the post didn’t gain traction, he would delete and post again as to not trigger protections against the same link being posted.
He was a cancer on Reddit and I’m sure he still exists under different monikers. But now there are 100s of gallowboobs.
gallowboob in particular was an interesting case because he was very much a real person. and oh hell did a subreddit I mod know that way all too well
i think the guy had a like a keyword alert on his username because like one of my co-mods on a subreddit would talk about the guy and then we'd get reports for "It's targeted harassment against me" (which are reports that are sent to the admins) like a few hours later. much to the dismay of him, we had a chat with the admins later and it was like "as long as you're not saying to do vote manipulate or harass the guy it's fine."
i think a lot of it came from the fact that so like if you're modding a subreddit, a lot of people spend their time in the modqueue view rather than the comments so you see the targeted harassment reports on "xyz is a meanie head" and just click "remove" because it already is on the edge at best for most subreddits. this is how context gets lost. so people would see "unfavorable treatment" (not that it didn't happen, gallowboob's company's domain was soft-banned on reddit yet his subreddits had automod rules set to approve them) when if more people were as trigger happy on the report button a similar thing would happen
the admin problems with this are much worse because the comments tend to be looked at in isolation so saying "i'm gonna kill you", in isolation, looks without context pretty bad, but might be part of a joke chain or song meme that reddit likes to do every so often. take into account the fact that admins get whiny sometimes if your AEO removals are too high. then take into account the AEO guy's Tarot card reading and whether Mercury is in retrograde and you get a lot of mods who are a bit trigger happy, esp when people've gotten banned for approving stuff the AEO removed for dumb reasons
this somewhat led to a bit of an inflated ego with regards to reddit but eventually from what i see he left... at least under that username anyway.
> He was a cancer on Reddit and I’m sure he still exists under different monikers. But now there are 100s of gallowboobs.
Yep, for example: If you mention the name "TurboStrider27" on /r/Games, your comment gets shadowbanned.
Holy hell!! The fact that this name still rings out to me years later really says something! And at one point /r/Games was the gaming subreddit for more informed people (compared to /r/gaming). And then one day somebody pointed out a guy named “TurboStrider27” was responsible for a large amount of slop posts. Lo-and-behold, a majority of posts did come from him.
I had no idea this was implicitly permitted (and even supported) but it makes sense if it’s been ongoing for so long. It’s no accident.