It seems like every time you try to do something nice on the internet, some has to come along and mess it up. A few members of one of my favorite sites, reddit.com, decided to organize a secret Santa gift exchange. They did and amazing job at building a new site(redditgifts.com) and organizing everything from the ground up and in the beginning everything was happiness and unicorn farts. In fact, things were going to so well, the secretsanta sub-reddit was turning into a nauseating circlejerk. It was Christmas time on reddit. Now there have been hiccups such as people getting crappy gifts or some people not sending, but that’s to be expected with a gift exchange among strangers of this size(around 5000 or so I believe). The problem was with how the organizers dealt with deadbeat santas and the inherit nature of recipe combined to create a disaster.
I should probably back up just bit and explain reddit to those of you unfamiliar with it before moving on. Reddit is a site composed of user submitted links and discussions where users get to up vote or down vote comments or post, similar to other popular sites such as digg.com. A majority of the time this leads to great results with the best posts and comments floating to the top, but these sites have an ugly side. You’ve probably heard the quote “with great power comes great responsibility”, and on reddit, users have more power than on most sites, but not all of them handle that responsibility well. This is where the secret Santa naughty list comes back into play. The way the organizers decided to deal with the bad santas that didn’t send a gift was to make a list with their reddit users names and a link back to their profiles. I don’t really have a problem with a hall of shame of sorts, but it’s the link back the profile that caused the issues. Sure if you have the username, it’s not overly difficult to see that users profile, but most people aren’t going to make any effort above clicking on a link. So the link it there and someone clicks through to the profile and sees all that user’s comments with that down vote button. This is where things break down for that portion of people who can’t handle the responsibility. They start down voting every thing that user has ever posted, despite the content not being relevant to the whole secret santa thing, and when you put that in front of a couple of thousand eyes and that ten percent that can’t really handle the responsibility, well you can probably guess the rest. The “bad santa’s” posts for the last couple of weeks, that had nothing to do with the secret santa, were effectively censored from the whole of reddit. Basically trolling is fought with more trolling and things just get made worse. Heck, I posted an opinion that this probably isn’t the best way to do things and my account attacked in the same manner, though to a lesser extent. Don’t you dare question the hive mind.
I wish I could leave it here that a secret santa on a user moderated site went a little awry and everyone learned from the mistakes, but unfortunately there is another little wrinkle to the story. While a more extensive “bad santa” list was planned for the coming days, it was launched with just a single name, exposing that single user to the ire of a lot of people all alone. This is where the organizers lose a bit of their credibility to just say “oops, we didn’t handle that well, better luck next time”.
I refer to this thread here for a little back story of what happened. The user is Bootled and the organizer is kickme444. In case any thing gets deleted, here are their comments on the matter.
Bootled:
I told them early that I have less money than I expected when I signed up. I also told them I was getting h0lylag a gift, albeit late and cheap. I might also have gotten pissed and said some mean things to whoever emailed me.
Fair enough, and here’s what kickme444 had to say on the matter:
This is the only response I will make about this. After I told bootled that he needed to live up to his end of the bargain, that the person who bought him a gift went above and beyond and he needed to figure out how to do this, this was his response to me:
“Fuck you asshole! Do you think that if I knew my bank was about to screw me over royally I have signed up? I’m buying [name taken out] a box of condoms when I can afford it. It’s not much, but I can’t even afford to get my family members christmas gifts. In short, fuck you.”
After this, I sent him this email:
“you are the irresponsible one here, your name will be going on the public list of people who couldn’t live up to their end of the bargain.”
his response was:
“Sweet. Now fuck off.”
Ok now, to me, it is not enough to say, i may send my giftee something at some point, especially when you have just told me that you can’t send something. If bootled would like to tell me, i’ve changed my mind, I am indeed sending something, I will gladly remove them. Its pretty easy, I do not want this list to exist, at all.
Now Bootled mentioned that he said some very nice and kickme444 confirms that. Bootled didn’t handle things well, but it’s not a one sided story. Instead of being the bigger man and just adding Bootled on to the list as a whole and releasing his name along with everyone elses, it would appear that kickme444 got offended by Bootled and released the list with just his name in it with other names being added Monday. This also wasn’t a simple case of them being in the middle of posting names when others stumbled upon it. No, he made the list with the one name and announced it in a post that list was up.
The good news in all this mess is that kickme444 has taken down the list and so far doesn’t appear to be putting up a new one. If was a fun experiment before it turned ungly, but I don’t think reddit or other similar communities are built for secret santa. Best to keep it with close groups of friends of smaller communities.