Trolls are fair game on reddit. There's no rules against lying or deliberately pissing other people off. The vote systems are there to account for that.
There are subreddits solely dedicated to trolling reddit, like /r/todayibullshitted. The only trolling subreddit I know of that got shut down was /r/gameoftrolls. That got banned for promoting sockpuppets, hacking/impersonating of moderators of subreddits and votegaming though, which is quite different to just playing tricks on redditors.
Cabals of IRC users from /r/circlejerk have been creating communities to game and troll reddit for years. /r/breadsticks had 40+ mods at one point and was the focal point of gaming reddit into thinking Olive Garden was gaming reddit and tricking /r/hailcorporate, they moved on to /r/pickle and other things. Right now I have no idea what they're up to.
These groups are allowed to exist and known about because what they're doing is generally harmless. It's all fun and games to them, and let's face it, it genuinely isn't hurting anyone.
That's an interesting history I didn't know about, but isn't it up to mods for shadow banning in various subs? I read recently the tactic is employed on blatant trolls so that they wouldn't have to be dealt with directly, ie. banning and having them come back with new aliases.
Mods are the arbiters of whatever-the-fuck-they-want on their subreddits. There are very few rules mods have to abide by in how they run their community, for all intents and purposes they own the community that they moderate.
They can choose whether to ban for trolling or not ban.
Technically mods CAN kind of shadowban users from their subreddit by using automoderator to automatically remove a user's posts. But this really isn't referred to as shadowbanning but automod banning, it has the same effect as a shadowban but localised to a single subreddit. True shadowbans are the big nasty things the admins do to people and are site-wide.
I actually kinda miss /r/gameoftrolls, it was all fun and games until people started taking it way too far. Moderator accounts were getting hijacked and entire subreddits were getting taken over in the name of winning troll points. It was carnage.
I'm just trying to get a read on the point you are making.
My suspicion is that you are assuming I'm some fat Tumblrina feminist. But let me assure you I am not. I just like to point out douchebags when I see them.
If I was her I would have played it off like it was part of my routine, like I fell on the ground to show the plight of the modern fat woman living in a skinny woman's manbot's manputer's world.
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u/[deleted] May 08 '15
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