/r/EternalDamnation
If the internet is hell, complete with gleeful tormentors and the cacophony of a billion crying screams, then Reddit is a whole circle unto itself. A hollow place, now boiling over with karma coveters, bandwagoners, Enlightened Atheists, MRAs, and people who love niche community drama. A place where productivity and post-2000 web design has all but been forgotten. From among the seventy million unique visitors last month, the pulsating hivemind of some twenty million registered users (really more like two and a half k) picked out the most hated individual cells among them, and internet megaphone site Daily Dot assembled it into a top ten list for the rest of us to enjoy. What became obvious after a read through wasn’t the list of offenses in particular, but what the offenses revealed about the sinners they embodied. By being elevated to status of The Worst and enshrined in a Top 10 list, each redditor metamorphosed into avatars of sorts, proverbial Saints to their particular Deadly Sin. With ancient theologian texts on hand, I carefully parsed their offenses and have been able to deduce exactly which realm of sin they now personify deep within belly of the hellmouth.
10) NoahsArcRises He is fairly well-hated. /u/hippiemachine wrote an epic in/r/Subredditdrama that details how he cheated on his wife and asked different subreddits for advice on how to get away with it. He eventually made another account,/u/BigRed79 I believe, that he used to talk about how he had sex with his mistress in his daughters bedroom. Eventually people recognized his wife on SI and contacted her with the ridiculous rationalizations and reasons he had for cheating. Through and through I would say he is pretty well hated for his public (as fuck) affair. (KickAhoeNdaFace)
If TMI was a sin NoahsArcRises would have it in spades. As it stands this really comes down to a pretty sad guy with a bent moral compass and no alarm bells in his head telling him to stop. His story should work as a bedtime tale to scare future generations of kids into not spewing their ethically negligent guts to millions of people.
Sin: LUST
9) Knettel37 (now defunct) He plagiarized a picture and whored for karma. (Aaddsa76)
A common story you hear around cyberspace, only this time magnified by the sense of betrayal that follows like a scent with every large community. The reddit collective does not take being lied to kindly, and if there’s a hole in your story their snappy internet detectives will find it. Plagiarizing a picture in the era of Google reverse image search isn’t a smart idea in the first place, as now even your feeblest attempts at approval from strangers can be dashed by a simple copy-and-paste.
Sin: SLOTH
8) WarPhalange He still gets a lot of hate for lying about having cancer. (IceCreamNarwhals)
In what is probably the most oddly post-modern and meta post on reddit culture itself, WarPhalange did eventually explain exactly why he lied about having cancer. He still ends up pointing a lot of fingers, like people lying about where they find items posted for approval, posters upvoting out of pity, cakeday posts, the whole gamet. He says he didn’t do it for the karma points, acknowledging those alone are not a “reward”, but cited how people upvote things to get other users’ attention. It’s a textbook case of Little Brother syndrome. He felt left out of the attention others were getting, and concocted a story to get a piece of his own. But hey, if you’re the kind of person who gets hurt by people faking cancer for sympathy on the internet (ie you or someone you know has cancer), “then you probably have some mental problems you need worked out.”. Trust WarPhalange, he would know.
Sin: ENVY
7) RobotAnna Fairly well known and annoying SRSer and SJW. Also a raging racist, sexist and seems to have serious issues with ‘CIS’ people as well. Here’s one of the many subs she mods. (Tim8080)
ShitRedditSays started as a reflection of mainstream reddit posting, and eventually formed its own niche subculture that turned out to be just as obnoxious. It’s active counter-culture, flipping the community’s own nastiness back onto itself and driving a wedge where it can with no real point or purpose. It’s great for laughs, but too many end up missing the joke and taking to it whole sale (see: MRAs), echoing banter until it slides well past inside joke territory and becomes almost gang-style identification, and not because of what it was originally funny for. Not that RobotAnna is among them. She couldn’t be more blunt and abrasive if she was a hammer wrapped in sandpaper.
Sin: WRATH
6) I_RAPE_CATS Reddit wanted to give a random video millions of views as an April fools joke and entrusted him with the task of selecting the target. He picked his friend’s and probably split the profit. (JEWBOY_BALLSACK)
The most charming paragraph of the whole, but really just another drop among many in the bucket of internet scams. He was given a position of great privilege, a vine of a million grapes with which to feed any poor, starving sap on Youtube, and instead decided to gouge on it with a friend. I can’t feel bad, because you really get what’s coming to you if you hand the reigns over to a dude who publicly identifies himself as I_RAPE_CATS.
Sin: GLUTTONY
5) violentacrez (now defunct) It’s a surprise that this guy, who ran Reddit’s creepy (often underage) underbelly and was the subject of a controversial Gawker profile, is so low on the list. Hosting Reddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots is bound to make a lot of people hate you. He was eventually doxxedafter all. He was pretty divisive. A lot of people liked him despite his subs because of his contributions to the site. (TimMitchell)
violentacrez is the kind of person you label a troll only to give yourself some assurance that it’s all a put on or done for the sake of edgy. Even under a national spotlight he seemed only to dig his heels in deeper to really push it, see how far it could go. The Gawker piece was the beginning of the end, but it also ended Gawker on reddit for a while, bringing to question the very framework that made the debate weird in the first place. A man making a stand in all the wrong places, violentacrez’s arc across the internet makes him a kind of sign post next to the intersection of Privacy Road and Public Sphere Avenue. All while being a huge creepy dick.
Sin: LUST
4) dont_stop_me_smee They hate him for putting more effort into milking karma from the situation than he ever did into trying to open the thing. I mean he started his own fricking subreddit and started live streaming the thing, but never bothered calling a locksmith?! Seems legit. (tophernator)
Besides having the best name on the list, dont_stop_me_smee’s tale is one we see happen far too often among the users and pushers of reddit. Locked safe stories on the site are the perfect example of how unwarranted hype and anticipation can slowly infect the mind, jumping from person to person like a bad cold. The end result is never as satisfying as the build up, but that didn’t stop dont_stop_me_smee from turning that build up into his own momentary brand, giving it the kind of online coverage we normally see for unboxing new gadgets.
Sin: PRIDE
3) IsoSwagger (now defunct) Well, over in /r/NBA, there was one by the name of/u/IsoSwagger that once made a post stating that if the Celtics came back in the series to beat the Knicks, then everybody that responded to that post would get $1 from him. The Celtics began winning and almost came back and/u/IsoSwagger deleted his account. Jokes are still being made about his infamous bet over in /r/NBA. (Abuschang)
A man lives and dies on the internet by his word and IsoSwagger, thinking he was safe on a high hill of smug, soon found himself cast to the gleeful, grabbing hands of the rabble as the Celtics began a comeback. Whether through fear or shame, he hastily rode west into the sun and can only be presumed now to be hiding among other redditors with an assumed identity, a man permanently torn between two lives. Remember that no-good cheating bandit IsoSwagger, an unsuspecting fellow may tell him, to which his only reply would be a halfhearted acknowledgement and another mouthful towards the bottom of his brew.
Sin: PRIDE
2) gtw08 (now defunct) One of the mods for /r/adviceanimals started using bots to downvote any non quickmeme links and upvote all memes posted from quickmeme. Eventually he was found out and is no longer a mod, and as a result of the fiasco, quickmeme is banned reddit wide. (Bragso)
gtw08 saw his chance to corner the market on animals with bolded text pasted over them, a visual medium more tired than your dead grandpa, and decided to take it. Taking a page from any modern corporation’s books, he went through the trouble of creating a program to drown out the visibility of his competitor while making his site the goto location for fifteen year olds to be the class clown. When he was found out, reddit salted the quickmeme soil and let the whole thing fade from memory.
Sin: GREED
1) Karmanaut …for a multitude of things (the alleged Bad Luck Brian AMA removal, the banning of shittywatercolour for advertising his website, using multiple accounts). (IranianGenius)
Karmanaut’s sins are many, but not even the seven deadly sins can compare to being placed #1 on the list of The Most Hated Redditors of All Time. That’s the sort of thing that should be branded on the skin and which burns in direct sunlight. Not much else to say.
Sin: THE WORST REDDITOR EVER
Thus the sin and the sinners are named, let their reckoning be swift. Whoever said hell would have good company better hope they let him build a fence.
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