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Comment by narrowtux | Hacker News Reader

According to an earlier tweet [1], the reports are from users who are mad they were banned from his discord server.

> Actually, it seems like this "report" to discord came on the heels of us banning a member for posting offensive content. That member then, to seek revenge, reported the entire server to Discord, and told us about it. Nice.

I've experienced similar immature behaviour in the Minecraft community back when it was at its popularity peak.

[1] https://twitter.com/jasonrohrer/status/1119751548542652416

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I've helped run a forum in the past, and holy shit is it scarily easy to make stupidly-determined enemies. Even people who joined just to spam offensive content would act like they were the one victimized when banned and would do all sorts of things to "even the score". I think these people would emotionally forget that they joined looking for a fight and earned their ban in the first place, and would then ride the high of righteous indignation.

Online forums for random topics used to be the last refuge of the mentally unstable. I've moderated several forums and saw this behavior first hand; a banned user would spend so much time and effort trying to stir the pot and get back at the forum's owners for their Injustice. I often wondered why would they choose to waste so much time in a niche forum rather than go do something productive.

Naturally, nowadays they have online forums that _cater_ to this kinds of individual (4chan, some subreddits, etc). Nature, um.. finds a way.

This is not unique to forums. Anyone that’s owned a retail or retail-analog business (eg, medicine) has to deal with precisely this sort of crazy-ass behavior on a reasonably frequent basis.

A tiny sliver of the population is effing nuts.

Mass Reporting to trigger automated systems has become a great way to silence your enemies. Note how discord did not explain jack squat about where this content was. Just an ultimatum to remove abstractly bad content with a deadline. All from mass reporting.

And how was there no system in place to prevent one disgruntled person from taking down someone else's entire project on a whim, without evidence?

And if they'd just found a few buddies to also spam Reports would that have made it any better?

Either way, a human should always review the case before pulling something long-lived offline. Random users should only be able to flag things for review, nothing more.

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