Thread by @triketora

icymi tl;dr i did an ama on reddit last week and it turned into a complete cesspit of toxicity with 4k+ comments from the troll brigade demonstrating perfectly why i'm working on @blockpartyapp_ and also why silicon valley culture is so fucked blockparty.substack.com/p/ask-me-anyth… 1/

[thread content warning: violence, trauma, harassment]

obviously the great irony is that i got harassed by these thousands of reddit trolls because i am working on anti-harassment software with @blockpartyapp_. it was horrific and traumatizing blockparty.substack.com/p/ask-me-anyth… 2/

some people have accused me of planning this all as a publicity stunt, bc duh "what did you expect." you know what, i SHOULD have known better, esp since @ekp got harassed out of reddit 5+ years ago trying to clean it up, but i was naively optimistic

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my ama was scheduled to start at 9:30a pt. i got there early. i was advised by friends who are longtime redditors that usually you wait a little while for q's to come in, then answer. i didn't post anything right away, but starting drafting...

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by the time i published my first answer (i think 15 min in) the thread had basically already turned into a cesspit. people trolling about how i wasn't answering questions, posting horrible bad faith comments about diversity & inclusion, other insults

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even though i was in shock at the deluge of toxicity, i still spent FOUR HOURS trying to answer questions thoughtfully. there were a couple of good q's in there, eg on filter bubbles, use of ml, etc. it was nice to have the opportunity to address them

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infuriatingly, the troll brigade went to quick work on downvoting all my answers into oblivion, then taunting me with shit like "she has no answer because her views are wrong". at some point multiple answers of mine were triple digit negative

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everytime i tried to point out that i WAS answering, those comments would get immediately downvoted. even now, if you look at my reddit user page, the only visible comments are me desperately trying to defend myself

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but you know what's even worse than utter fucking disaster of the ama, the complete trauma of that situation? reddit's response to it. my fucking god. their response was to BLAME ME and say they don't condone harassment and to tell me to clean it up

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everyone from reddit blamed me. the official twitter account. mods. employees. no acknowledgement of the situation, much less apology or accountability. and even tho it doesn't matter, it fucking hurt that my FRIENDS who work there didn't even care

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i am no expert on reddit as i previously steered far clear of it & apart from my mistake last week will do so in the future; but it is clear that they do not care to make even the most basic fixes to check the metastasis of the hate on their platform

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ok, so, how exactly was this my fault? spoiler: IT WASN'T. (asshole mod, on twitter, helpfully: "you're wrong." god, fuck you.) but what happened was there was a ux/mod/tech bug somewhere platform-side that posted the ama from my teammate's account...

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i did everything exactly as i was supposed to. i don't know what went wrong on reddit's side but it DOESN'T EVEN MATTER bc all that that mixup did was prevent one pathetic anti-harassment protection from kicking in. everything else was still fucked

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even if i had made a mistake, which i didn't, reddit's strategy of trying to blame the user for not understanding their fundamentally user-unfriendly product is a classic ex of tech co's complete abdication of responsibility for harm they've caused

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but, back to the real problem of the festering cesspit of toxicity and coordinated harassment. reddit was just trying to distract from that. reddit's voting mechanisms are well known to be problematic. and y'all, there are some fucking simple fixes

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don't get me wrong, communities are hard. but there are such stupid simple mod tools reddit could build and refuses to. don't link downvote protection to op. at least allow multi-author posts, or author handoff. OR JUST BE ABLE TO UNHIDE AN ANSWER

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reddit, don't come at me with your pathetic mansplainy excuse of "it's a technical issue". i was one of the first engineers at quora, ALSO a site with comments, voting, and ranking. i built mod tools. please stfu. it's your choice to not fix this

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online harassment is a form of violence. what i experienced on reddit was a coordinated, sustained act of violence. and not only did the authorities and responsible parties not stop it, they gaslit and blamed the victim

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the psychological trauma is devastating. i already have to live in a constant state of paranoia because of stalkers and harassers who might turn more dangerous, but i can't overstate how awful the deluge of online harassment is, nowhere is safe 19/

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it was a few days before the harassment died down. i avoided reddit but there was overflow to twitter, even our waitlist signups. i desperately wanted to take a mental health holiday but as a solo startup founder, i couldn't even do that

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mods locked my ama thread with complete bullshit frozen into place and a top voted "question" with thousands of votes that willfully misinterpreted our privacy policy and claimed we were a data farm that sold user data. fake outrage over a fake issue

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nevertheless, despite the fact that these redditors "genuine questions" abt our privacy policy were most assuredly not genuine, it is SO important to us to be clear on our commitment to put users first i've spent the last week doing revs on our policy

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the big lolsob about the argument that bc i used to work at fb i am obv selling user data is that i was so put off by fb's cavalier disregard for user data that i once wrote a quora answer about it and got downvoted into oblivion by fb employees 🙃

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if we must grasp at silver linings, my whole reddit ama experience only made me that much more certain of the importance of what we’re working on at @blockpartyapp_

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unfathomably, some people think the platforms are going to solve the problem of online harassment. lmao. ok, i must give credit to some for trying, BUT even then...

https://twitter.com/triketora/status/1296267876144472064

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one fundamental issue with platform-wide solves is that platforms have to define a bright line for tos policy violations but just because things aren't so egregious that they get banned doesn't mean they're good or that the community is healthy

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another enraging artifact of reddit's piss-poor moderation: they've now removed the worst content, but it amounts basically to a destruction of evidence and setup for people to gaslight me or think i'm overreacting, "it doesn't look that bad"

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classic harassment trick: send the abuse, then delete it after you know the person's seen it. attack, then destroy the evidence

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yet another data point for how pathological it is that platforms put the burden of managing abuse on those targeted by it. yes, go wade through 4k+ comments to report abuse. go thru again to document and re-traumatize yourself, or we won't believe you

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so yeah. with @blockpartyapp_ we are designing around these very problems. filtering unwanted content to another folder, you choose if/when you want to look at it. helpers who can review on your behalf. block party keeps the evidence if you need it

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as horrible as this all is, i'm glad i have the opportunity to try to solve the very real problem of online harassment that i myself have. it's a problem that most platform builders and funders cannot understand and completely dismiss

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it's just unfortunate that as hard as the startup journey already is, and as a solo founder, a female founder, i ALSO have to deal with overwhelming amounts of abuse and the utter reckless refusal of platforms to be accountable for any of it

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my last week has been completely miserable. but i am so so grateful to the people who reached out to offer their support, and more than anything acknowledge and validate that what i was going through was absolutely not okay and not my fault.

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i want to end on a positive note, but truthfully, i'm scared. i think things are only going to get worse as the brokenness of the internet becomes more and more overwhelming and the toxicity of the tech industry forces out the people who could fix it

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for now, though, i'm still in the fight. i’m doing everything i can to try to make things better, not just for me but for everyone who must endure this almost unbearable heaviness of online existence.

blockparty.substack.com/p/ask-me-anyth… fin

addendum. NOW someone from reddit has reached out! more than a week later. he couldn't even get the basic details right or do any homework. god i'm so angry. still no real acknowledgment of what the fuck happened, just "i'm sorry you had a bad experience". no accountability.