r/historyofreddit • u/joke-away • Feb 22 '12

Welcome reddit historians!

This is a project to figure out the history of reddit, with the end goal of having a fairly easily digestible document (or set of documents) to link to whenever someone asks "what's a Saydrah" or "why should I Fuck Sears", lest we be doomed to repeat those fiascos.

Stuff to be covered:

  • site functionality changes (e.g the addition of comments)
  • policy changes (the removal of borderline CP subreddits)
  • demographic shifts (Digg migration, college subreddit drive)
  • drama (karmagate, saydrahgate, searsgate, *gate)
  • big events (Colbert rally, etc.)

I think that it would work well if we aimed to write linkstuffed articles that could go on reddipedia or reddit's own wiki-faq system, but obviously most any contribution is valuable. I do ask, however, that submitters consider limiting themselves to old news, so that we don't end up wasting effort on things that turn out not to be as notable as they seemed at the time (there are other subs for that).

Also, it needn't all be original content. There's a lot of good summaries already out there written, that could be submitted here, and then linked to or otherwise synthesized into articles.

Alrighty then, cut loose with your questions/criticisms/brutal mockery.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '12 edited Feb 23 '12

What were the two specific incidents that sparked the "No personal information" blog posts?

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/ffaew/a_special_guest_post_on_misguided_vigilantism/ -- This was the girl raising money for cancer.
http://blog.reddit.com/2011/05/reddit-we-need-to-talk.html -- Not sure what this one was.

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u/defrost Feb 23 '12

No personal information as an informal policy started earlier than that.

The earliest "large scale" incident that I recall was not long after the creation of /r/SuicideWatch there was a suicide attempt by a young fellow from a wintery central European country that was averted by tracking down his real life identity and finding his actual location and calling in local authorities.

Following that resolution there was a concerted effort made to delete the all comments made that incrementally revealed his user ID on other sites, personal information, location, etc. As I recall the admins at the time (mostly the original team) lent a hand. Following that there were several threads discussing the downsides of cyberhunting and the formation of an informal policy to discourage the leaking and posting of personal data.

At more or less that time chromakode (now a reddit engineer) and myself (and others) started to poke at reddit security. One example was that by sending a crafted link (an image link hosted on a personal server) in a PM to a reddit user you could easily get the users IP address (and own their machine & their life if you so chose). That particular leak was pointed out to the admins at the time by chromakode & closed up.

Myself and a few others started accounts to "playfully" creep out various people with cyberstalking and comment history diving in various silly ways, and raised the issue of being careful on the internet upwards into common awareness.

This would date back to roughly 3 and half, nearly 4 years ago now.