Oppugn.us

Everyone knows I think reddit is full of a bunch of complete fucking morons. The only section of reddit I frequent is /r/guitar because it's actually very tame and useful. The rest of reddit is full of the absolute worst of the 20-1-percenters you could ever find. Completely incompetent totall blowhards who couldn't find their ass with both hands and a bag of rusty handgrenades will spout off there like they know shit.

If you contrast this with HN it's night and day. HNers are intelligent, and while they seem unable to read sometimes, they at least have interesting things to say. I used to love reading the HN comments, because even when they were brutal about something I wrote they were insightful 90% of the time.

Reddit is the equivalent of squeezing every pimple on every teenage nerd's face into a giant cup, irradiating it with gamma radiation, and then feeding it to the The Commic Book guy with an Star Trek phaser enema. They're pointless useless little morons, and one day I decided to troll them as hard as I could.

The end result is that I've trolled reddit so hard that they end up trolling themselves, and I'm going to explain to you exactly how I did it.

First, I recognized that there was a fairly distinct separation between the commenters on HN and reddit. Whenever there were too many reddit stories showing up in HN the residents of HN would complain about it. They even invented a defense mechanism or two. This meant that I could play them off eachother fairly easily.

Next, I setup a simple assertion that redditors are stupid fucks and HN is where the smart people were. This played into the existing insecurity of the average redditor that in reality they aren't all that smart, and played to the HNer's belief that they're the smart ones. By setting up this "us vs. them" situation it made it easy to then write rants and include that fact.

The next step was to write as many rants as I could, and completely outright insult and rip into reddit, but boost and say I love HN. The key was that redditors tended to not read whole articles. They're like slashdot in how often the phrase "if you read TFA" showed up in comments. This meant that there was a particular pattern I had to follow in my rants.

What I would do is structure my rants to catch the idiots who can't read. I'd put the inflamatory anti-reddit fodder at the beginning. Redditors would then read that, stop, and then run right back to reddit to comment on how stupid I was. Shortly after that part I'd have my funny entertaining rant, boost the HN crowd, make my points, and then at the very end I'd come clean. I'd give the HN crowd ammo against the reddit crowd.

Finally, I just kept doing this for a few months and monitoring the comments. What I was looking for was this comment pattern:

dickhead: Zed is such a fucking moron, his statement X is totally wrong!

smart reader: Well, if you read the fucking article he says....

My goal was to continue writing rants so that this increased on reddit and decreased on HN. This would then further fuel their group think opinion of me which would then feed into the dynamic between the two crowds. Once the redditors got their "origin story" about me to a certain point they would eventually continue to make completely moronic statements and mistakes and my work would be done. They would be trolling themselves for me.

It actually didn't take too long. I think it was maybe a few months of blasting them, and then finally I wrote a few test rants and the pattern continued on its own. Reddit consistently failed to read anything I wrote, failed to get the jokes, and came off as complete utter douchebags. Meanwhile HN seemed to get more consistent in their opinions of me, read my articles more completely, and have mor thoughtful discussions whether they agreed or disagreed.

Now I'm going to tell you the part where I come clean so that the redditors miss it and you can go make fun of them for not reading the article. All that stuff I said at the beginning where I hated reddit and love HN is bullshit. What I actually did was just pick the easy target. At the time I could have cared less about HN (although now I like them a lot), all I was interested in was seeing if I could whip one community into hating me and another into liking me. I chose reddit to hate me and HN to like me.

Now I kick back and watch reddit consistently repeat the story I fed them almost two years ago and laugh. They are on auto-troll.