How I became a reddit war criminal

So I found myself on Reddit Friday night, and I saw a post about the size of the stars in the universe.

You can see right on that page what caught my eye:

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JelloShotz had done a good old ASCII Art picture of Fry (done with Unicode characters, of course).

I had been wondering just what kind of nonsense one could put into a Reddit title. People have put a few clever Unicode things into them before, like the right-to-left character.

So would this work as a Reddit title in its own right? I didn't think so; I'd probably have to do something weird, like submit 30 titles all at once, to build it all up.

So I tossed a post together quickly, submitted it, and my heart skipped a beat as my screen refreshed showing everything working perfectly.

I expected the submission to look like a bunch of garbage and quickly disappear from sight. But it worked on the first time. (Reddit titles don't allow carriage returns, AFAIK; it worked because the width of each row was enough to force one "word" per line.) And right in your face, too.

You can't un-ring a bell.

I thought about deleting it right away. But when I checked my votes, I had 3 upvotes. People had noticed already, and if I removed my entry, someone would just create another one, now that they realized how it could be done. So I left it there, unsure of just how the community would react to it.

I made two comments, hoping to throw myself on the mercy of the crowd. I asked if I should feel bad, and another pointing either credit or blame (depending on your opinion of my submission) to the original artist. Stealing credit is bad.

I watched it spend the next few minutes accumulating upvotes, with an occasional downvote. So, it seemed to be going fine.

It would hit #1 just after an hour. And most people were cool with it. The little pieces of animus were pretty funny, especially the charges comparing me with a kid pointing a gun at a friend. The best gave me a title for this post.

The reaction as I went to bed was decent; 905 upvotes and 385 downvotes. I had to go on a Cub Scout hike the next morning so I didn't get to check things until Saturday afternoon, at which point I was at 2134 upvotes and 1926 downvotes. While the Friday night crowd may have enjoyed it, clearly the Saturday morning crowd wasn't having any of it.

I got some questions from colleagues and commenters so I just put them all here:

Q. You linked to cats in sinks? WTF?

A. I needed a URL, so I just looked through the ones saved in my browser.

Catsinsinks.com a common testing URL I use for my lolograms.com project. I figured it was nice and innocuous. Despite the fact that this could've been a huge driver of clicks, I passed up on pimping my own personal project, because 1) it's definitely not ready for a reddit effect, 2) it would practically be an invitation for people to try their own Unicode-ART, and I haven't set up any defense against it, and 3) if this pissed people off, I didn't want them to find themselves on my doorstep.

Q. Dude. What the hell.

A. Sorry. I can't say that if I could go back and in time that I'd do it any differently, but I get why people would be pissed about it showing up at #1. If it's any consolation, hundreds of people voted to put it there.

Q. What if everyone does this?

A. Anything annoying can't get into the top page, pretty much by definition. I did have this chill run down my spine in the few seconds after I realized I had successfully posted: what if we're gonna get a whole bunch of titles like this?

The "new" page could definitely become a wasteland, but this is already true with people posting plain old spam links. The defenses against those posts would work against these ASCII art type posts.

Q. Did you consider telling the Reddit founders about it first?

I did consider that; and in the past I informed them about a particular nasty way of submitting things that could really piss people off without anyone being able to track down who did it. They handled it very professionally, which would encourage me to do it again.

(I've yet to publicly release that flaw -- a new baby tends to occupy one's time -- but they've already fixed it. I'll get around to it at some point.)

I'm not sure what I could've said to them, though. "People can be dicks when submitting stories"? I think they know that one. ;)