Stupid stale milk that I'm writing out because I have no one to ever tell about this. I was part of this video game forum. They had a voting system as well as this feature where if you earn enough points from votes, you'd automatically gain some restricted editing privileges, the idea being that good contributors could help clean up low quality posts.
One guy had this ability and some powertripping mod was harassing him one day for no reason, so he just decides, screw it, and spam edited posts to show an image of the unjust treatment he received. Obviously he was banned and the edits were reverted. But for whatever reason, this was a big deal to people and spawned a ton of autism.
For one, some users who joined years after the fact, who have never even met this guy, would make posts WKing him and campaigning that he should be unbanned because "he totally changed! I believe in his heart!!" I have no idea why, but for some people he was like a martyr even though half of them didn't even know anything about him or his ban.
On the other hand, others were bizarrely fearful of him and constantly gossiped about him like some sort of ghost story. The story got insanely exaggerated too, with details about him being an illegal hacker who went rogue and broke the website after he was rejected by a mod that he had a gay crush on. It snowballed as this absurd game of telephone where people who don't know a single thing about this random user were tinfoiling and basically inventing fanfiction about it, and actually believing it.
For whatever reason mods on the website had a seething grudge over him and treated him like this Voldemort figure where you're not allowed to mention his name. One would even ban people just for being friends with someone who vaguely alluded to support for him, so random people were getting thrown under the bus for the weakest association.
I actually know this infamous user and would talk to him off-site, and even he has no idea why he became such a legendary and polarizing figure over practically nothing. One time he went back and made a bunch of duplicate accounts, not even doing anything with them, but people started crying and losing their minds over seeing his accounts in the user list, sending furious messages to him saying to go away and begging mods to do something. One schizo had a meltdown because he perceived one of the account usernames to be a specific, targeted insult towards himself (never mind the fact that n
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.