I was the target of a harassment campaign on Reddit as a teen. This is my story.

(If this isn't the right place to post this, please let me know.)

This is going to be a very long post (an essay maybe), because that's what it is. Some parts may go all over the place, but that's because my mind will go bankrupt everytime I remember it. Even though years have passed since it ended and everybody has moved on, I am still occasionally afraid of potentional retaliation. I don't have a lot of proof in the form of screenshots because it just hurts looking back, but I will try to explain with the best of my ability.

There were some details to the story that I left out because I didn't think they were relevant. And before I get any comments questioning my involvement with a subreddit like this: I was one of the kids that fell down the "anti-SJW rabbithole, and communities like these prey on vulnerable young people, regardless of gender and sexuality. I was so attached to this community that I refused to leave despite it hurting me.

For context, I am currently 20 years old, and all of this happened when I was 13-14.

PS: Please do not try to go and contact my harassers. Most are suspended, some deleted their accounts and others are inactive. However, very few of them are still active on Reddit to this day. Regardless of where they are or what happened to them, still do not go out and contact them. Plus, the subreddit where the harassment first took place is banned now.

Alright, here's the story:

It was late July 2017. I discovered a subreddit we will call "X" via an app called iFunny, dedicated to supposedly real stories about intellectually and developmentally disabled people doing mundane things with the intent to mock them, with the majority of the subjects being children, in a "4chan greentext" format. I discovered it via an app called iFunny, so I decided to create a Reddit account there to post my own "t*rd stories". They got upvotes and not-so-bad comments, inspiring me to create more. However, little did I know at the time that joining the subreddit would be the biggest mistake of my life.

In late August of that year, a user within the subreddit made a call-out post with my username in the title, indirectly asking me to "stop posting obviously-fake tard stories", calling me "the real t*rd". It was THE post that caused all the the troubles I went through on the big R. I had civil arguments with other users that only turned aggressive since they mostly responded back with insults. It got to the point that I, at one point, fell into depression. The few that supported me told me not to mention anything about the subreddit to avoid being hunted down by the mob, but I was too stubborn because I wanted to take back all the power they had over me via those arguments. Mind you, I was 13-14-years-old at the time this whole shit happened.

When I made a return to the subreddit in the hopes that I could be better and fit into their rigid standards, I was hounded down with insults, told to "fuck off", and even got stalked in almost every other subreddit I was in. Angry, I created a counter-sub in the hopes of reforming X. A day after I created the sub, one of my harassers created a secret burner account pretending to be on my side, messaged me via ModMail that they wanted to join. Not long after I let them in, they ended up causing trouble on X by picking fights with the users. For some reason, people thought that it was me in an alt account, and even had one accusing the account of being me using a throwaway account to pretend that people liked me, and that I was chasing my haters across Reddit by telling them off". The targeted switched them to say that "they were not me".

When this whole drama was dying down, so did the activity of the reform sub, but oh holy moly, it didn't really end there. One of my major harassers and stalker, who became a mod after one of the old moderators have him the roles, made a post on a "help" sub for Reddit mods trying to imply that I was making multiple accounts to evade bans, when I have never did sort of thing and that acc he was implying wasn't even mine and never was. I tried contacting the sub's mods about taking down the post, but they denied my request because the post didn't have any usernames on it. I got angry with the harasser and demanded he apologised, which led to me being temp banned from the sub for "trying to cause drama again".

At that time, I began to question the user I believed to be on my side. I sent a PM to them about their username and the true purpose of the account, but they never responded back. With more questions in my mind, I reached out to the "help" sub, telling other users that I suspected that somebody was impersonating me or it it was all just a coincidence, as for some more context, their username vaguely resembled mine, though they were named after a character from a game I have no interest in.

My harasser then barged in and silenced me by saying that none of the other moderators thought that the user was me and that I should have no concerns regarding that account. Many hours after I made that post, the "imposter" account was mysteriously deleted. Shockingly, it still didn't end here!

My other harasser with a history of indirectly harassing others by namedropping them with derogatory remarks under the guise of "memes", had done it multiple times, even long after the three other dramas were over. They did it in the comments within tardtales, and even on other "edgy" subreddits. Informing another old moderator about it, hell broke loose again, but the other harasser who had deep ties with him tried to downplay the situation, and even compared me to Hitler by saying that "even though he might've said sorry that doesn't change what happened" when I tried apologising multiple times for my behaviour because of my vulnerability and the fact that I WAS JUST A CHILD AT THE TIME THIS WHOLE THING WAS GOING ON. I didn't question it because if I did then he would silence me even more.

Even after this whole situation, the other harasser would still get away with this behaviour and even get promoted as mod by the other major harasser.

All this time leading to mid-2018, I contacted the mods of other subreddits he was in getting them to delete comments and ban him for namedropping me. And mind you, the admins did jackshit about the harassment campaign I was caught in. I contacted them multiple times via the normal Reddit PM system and email, and always got the same bullshit AI bot response that goes "thanks for reporting. my important advice is to ignore the users and not reply to them further", yet, even if I didn't engage with them, they still insultet me. The block button wasn't better either because it only let you so that once you blocked the person bothering you, YOU WOULDN'T SEE THEM INTERACTING WITH YOU rather than the system in all other socmeds where the blocked cannot communicate with you AT ALL.

Furious from being ignored by the admins, I re-opened the reform subreddit, made a call-out video specifically for one of my harassers, and got the "mod" to see it. A few days later, he mocked me and banned me from X, and THEN made a copy subreddit with a description that said "fuck off (my username)", trying to get me to keep it. Obviously, I didn't want to keep it, and successfully closed it own after several failed attempts. At one point, I brought the two harassers including X up on a sub where you could report a misbehaving mod, where each of us told our own versions of the story.

Guess who the sub's mods sided with?

Following up, I was threatened to get reported to the admins and then suspended, and afraid, I had no choice but to comply. And then, a few months later, something miraculous happened...

The harasser who stalked me, who was a mod for X, got his mod privileges revoked, and banned from the subreddit after one of the old moderators (the kindest I've ever seen tbh) got multiple messages from other users saying that he mistreated them, and when doing an investigation through his acc, the old mod realised that everything he was told turned out to be true. He got banned, and never touched the subreddit again.

Due to all of the stress and trauma surrounding my harassment, I decided, after being inactive for months after getting advice from someone on Discord, deleted my account (exactly two years after it was created), vowing to never go back there again.

I guess I'm done with the story. Remember, it is supposed to tell you about how Reddit's administration team doesn't take reports about rule violations seriously, mostly harassment/cyberbullying-related, and the fact that they care more about the site's reputation than the safety of their own users. Looking back at it 6 years from now, I'm glad that my sister tried to keep me away from the site.