I don’t know what “brigading” entails in the rules of this subreddit so I’ll only link to the issue in the comments if I have permission, but for the past week, I’ve had to deal what appears to be a single ban evading harasser with multiple accounts, though they tell me it’s multiple people.

At the beginning, the reports seemed to work, though I had to file many, many, many reports. They would harass me. I would report them. The spam detectors would see them as spam. They’d come back thirty minutes later. This cycle continued ten times. They ban evaded ten times over the course of four hours. Finally, they said that they would change tactics, where instead of going on me directly, they would both make posts slandering me as well as replying to my own posts telling people to slander me “when I least expect it”.

However, it was at this point sending reports stopped working.

However many people there have been involved, every time I made a post, they’d reply to it saying “this person is a pedo blah blah blah check out these links whose interpretations I shall spoonfeed to you to ‘prove’ it”. If I reported them, it wouldn’t work. If I blocked them, they’d block evade, and even if I reported them for block evading, it wouldn’t work. Their accounts at any given time would have to be 1) reported by an onlooker and 2) reported for breaking that subreddit’s rules, as shown by the fact their successfully reported comments wouldn’t look like they were reported but instead treated as spam.

In one such instance, they signed up with my real name as their username. I don’t know the protocol for impersonation, I wouldn’t know for example if you had to be famous or not in order to be able to say “that’s my name”.

At one point, this morning, I got my very first ever violation warning. Reddit said it was because I revealed someone else’s account without their permission. I am accepting of my report but had many questions, so I asked about it in r/help with such questions as what the criteria is to see where the boundaries were with the rule so I could avoid breaking the rule again. The only person who would reply to the question told me Reddit purposefully makes that vague in order to keep people from exploiting loopholes (my very first WTF moment with Reddit). Lo and behold, the harasser/slanderer (or one of them) then shows up in what I would assume is in plain view of all the Reddit mods. And this person who told me about the vagueness, who calls themself a pioneer helper in a subreddit where there is one rule against callouts, one rule against uncivility, and one rule against post hijacking (all three of which which would’ve been broken by the act of simply barging in to make claims about me) was all like “thanks for the tip” without even questioning it. It’s a subreddit run by Reddit admins, and I’m almost positive they must’ve seen the replies on the post because the post is currently removed (I’m split on whether it was automod as it was so belated). Yet this person who keeps spreading stuff about me remained unscratched.

This has continued a little more since then. I’m also worried in a sense because I accidentally phrased a then-future comment in a way that seemed like I was breaking the same rule that got me the Reddit violation warning this morning when referring to a post of one of the harassing accounts while talking about the other. I edited it three hours later, but the concern of the aforementioned vagueness looms. Feel free to answer those concerns below too.

I’ve sent reports days ago that never lead to anything, and other setbacks include…

  • If I block them, they either block evade or talk behind my back, and I know for a fact Reddit disabled the ability for anyone to report people you’ve blocked and people who have blocked you.

  • If I ignore them, they continue doing their thing.

  • If I argue, it just makes the discussion grow.

So on and so forth.

They want to do this on a number of sites they know I’m on and even offline. There is NO containment here. Yet all I’d really need to solve this is working reports. What are the possibilities of what could be going on here?

  • remotelove@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    Sometimes the best option is to delete all the comments that triggered this and wait it out. (It doesn’t matter if you were right or wrong, btw. You just want to slow this down, correct?) Redditors have really short attention spans so just create another account and wait a while. (Maybe a week or two)

    Some users may have started following your account and will see when you post again. Just ignore them.

    Reporting to the admins is pointless. I seriously doubt any mod on Reddit gives a fuck now.

    Or, just ditch Reddit completely. Best choice I ever made, actually.

    • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeOP
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      8 months ago

      The comments that triggered this were on DeviantArt. I had been semi-banned from there a year or so ago and forum-banned from there a year before that. And a year before that was when I made the trio of comments. I would tell anyone who asks that they were meant to be comments of friendship, but they came off as too much more, and the person it was to was young. DeviantArt admins knew I was good-intentioned and so did he, but onlookers went berserk. That is where this all started.

      I did at one point try to take responsibility, not from the point of view of my intentions but from the point of view of how people perceived it. I was by that time forum-banned, which meant the same forums (excluding the admins, they knew I was fine, having banned me for completely unrelated reasons, but also didn’t stop the people there from reaction in a huge mob) that wished I apologize wouldn’t let me in to actually deliver the apology, so I asked two people to deliver it on my behalf. As you would see in the replies to the apologies, it was violent and about as good as not giving one.

      This nightmare of a reputation I have online is intertwined with the one I have offline like a body of vines. I’ve been seen as suspicious at school, at jobs, during errands, etc. I question myself deeply.

      People who don’t like me use this kind of stuff as ammo. In the case of the harasser mentioned in the OP, they also mention a Tumblr group I have. The inspiration for it was about witch hunting, and so I made a Tumblr group about “due process”. You know how they responded to this competition? They began to witch hunt it. More ammo. I could list all the ammo they use.

      The harasser in the OP in particular is angry because I, while lurking on DeviantArt, saw someone get the wrong idea of me while being talked about, noticed them on Buzzly, and began to try to make friends with them. Someone observed this interaction and prompted them to cut me off based on the fact I often sign up for sites with usernames of people from other sites. Then someone asked me about it on Tumblr and my remark that their grudge on me was one-sided hurt them and they removed their accounts on all three sites. However this person came back later on under a new username, and someone remarked in my Tumblr group that they were doing exactly as they cut me off for, which prompted them to get spooked again and leave all three site again, this time permanently. Cue the harasser, who is being protective of the friend, even though I hadn’t said a single word against them.

      Note that there is a fuller story, but it would take hours to type even the chapters.

      • remotelove@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        Ok. You tried to take accountability for whatever it was. Good. I have fucked up plenty of times in my life. I have been fired a couple of times, lost all of my friends, etc. In my case, I was just a drunk asshole. That life is dead and I moved on.

        Allow me to be a little stern and extremely serious for a second.

        Now, you need to let whatever it was that happened fade into the past. Drop any and all online identities that you have. Nuke any post that you ever made. Save any media that you want to keep and that’ll be that.

        While you still have to live with stuff offline, that is fine. It’ll fade eventually as well.

        I personally don’t know the details of your life and I personally don’t want to know. You can move on, but you really need to commit to it when you do. When you finish school, that will help as you can physically move.

        Look, if you fucked up really bad or are actually the victim doesn’t matter in this case. You do have the capability to hit the reset button and stop the metaphorical bleeding now.

        Most of all, seek a therapist and/or an attorney if things are that serious. This shit will take a mental toll and you likely need assistance that you can’t get here on Lemmy.

        Disappear first, get assistance then start building a new life. Most of all, whatever happened before, don’t let it happen again.

        Delete this Lemmy account. You have now linked your old user accounts to this one. It’s only a matter of time before these comments are indexed by a search engine. Don’t link anything to your old online personas.

          • remotelove@lemmy.ca
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            8 months ago

            Yes? You described a problem that seems simple on the surface. However…

            Very quickly, you described a problem that actually has many moving parts and may exist in your offline life as well. There are several social media sites involved. To top it off, you described the catalyst as being controversial from the start. Since you were in DeviantArt, it was likely your intention to market your skills and get a ton of exposure. More exposure means a unique set of online problems.

            You have two options that I can think of: You can ignore the trolls following you around. Continue with your life as-is. or: Erase or archive the online persona that you have built and start over. Let any drama fade with time.

            • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeOP
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              8 months ago

              That was a tangent of mine, sorry about that. I was hoping, or rather asking, if there was a third option, to see why my prosperity on there isn’t working via features that should be operating a certain way, since Reddit, under normal circumstances, should/would not have this issue.

              • remotelove@lemmy.ca
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                8 months ago

                All good. Tangents are a thing.

                Trying to look at your problem and narrow it down to the actual core issues was a little challenging, but that is OK! There might be a third option. I dunno. Until you think of one, stop posting and take some away from being online.

                Online issues are an interesting problem, for sure.

  • Kaboom@reddthat.com
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    8 months ago

    Personally, I would just delete the account and make a new one. Hard to follow an account that doesnt exist

      • crapwittyname@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        Save the media. Don’t base your identity on a username. Realise that you’ve salted the earth and delete the now-toxic accounts. That’s kind of the whole point of anon forums, you don’t have to drag a reputation around with you.
        There’s a different perspective here, which I think you might be missing: the stakes you’re talking about are so low as to be negligible, from an outside perspective. You don’t have to be as worried about this issue as you are. I think the advice you’ve gotten on this thread so far is sound. Take some time, take some distance. Do something else for a while and shift your focus. You’ll start to see things differently. Get distracted. Part of being independent is doing the shit our parents used to do for us, and one of those is distracting yourself from unnecessary bullshit. I’m an extremely obsessive person myself, and learning when and how to let shit go is as liberating as it is seemingly impossible. I honestly can’t recommend it enough.
        All this is said with love, and I hope you find your way, internet stranger.

        • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeOP
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          8 months ago

          Why does everyone keep saying things along the lines of this whenever someone asks a conflict-related question about Reddit on Lemmy, or a conflict-related question anywhere about anywhere? The titular question was about functionality, I don’t want to be absolutist in this way every time I have a tech issue that happens to have a degree of conflict in it, it’s not like I’m complaining about a mere “fact of life” when we’re talking about site oversights.

          • HandBash@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            From what I observe and gather, it is that reddit usage is working as they intend it. I.e. it is not designed to be effective because it does not add value to their IPO goals. It may not be the answer to your question, but more so an explanation of why your question does not have a good answer. You can try barking up more trees because legitimately it seems like your case is an abuse of their rules or terms but ultimately there is not much recourse you can do to force their hand to follow their own policies.

    • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeOP
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      8 months ago

      My answer to that is my answer elsewhere here. Do I want to withdraw from the mess? Yes. It’s what I’d be leaving behind that scares me, people who will have their way for the umpteenth time with the front page of the internet. I also wish to know the titular question, the motivation for the post.