Social news site Reddit’s early growth happened thanks, in large part, to the legendary quality of its discussion threads.
But as the site has shot post 18 million users, that discussion quality has taken a much-talked-about nosedive.
So it shouldn’t be any surprise that a site once famous for erudite conversations has somehow spat out a troll account that mocks the site and its users with exemplary sophistication.
Because Redditor KILL365 isn’t any typical troll—someone who takes pleasure in courting controversy online (or just being a jerk).
KILL365 takes the game to another level. The redditor (a guy, by all accounts) writes comments that seem entirely sensible when taken out of context.
But in context, they either defy logic or intentionally misinterpret a bad joke.
A typical exchange:
“In all fairness, they have to translate the movie into Australian,” joked one redditor in a thread complaining about a movie’s delayed release in Australia. “It’s tough putting all of those “crikeys” in there at the right moments.”
Replied KILL365:
“Spoiler alert, Australians speak English too. Beyond that, not every country is America where you need to dub foreign films to suit the likings of those living in trailer parks.”
KILL365 doesn’t stick to just posting comments. He also starts threads. These are either works of vicious sarcasm at Reddit’s expense, or blatant karma-whoring posts (intended, no doubt, to mock the practice of garnering karma points, Reddit’s method for keeping track of the praise a user garners for submissions to the site and comments).
The goal? Many assume it’s simply to accumulate negative karma—a kind of masochistic Reddit game.
But there’s more it it than that. As one insightful redditor observed, the troll is attempting “commentary on the sad state and manipulability of the reddit hivemind.”
A perfect example came just yesterday when ProbablyHittingOnYou, a Reddit power user who ranks fourth in combined karma on the site, called out KILL365 on one of his karma-whoring posts.
“This submission is a shameful hybrid of crappy memes and pity seeking,” ProbablyHittingOnYou wrote, apparently unaware that the source of his wrath was a troll account.
KILL365 rarely replies directly to other redditors. But this time he did:
“Sounds like I’ve come to the right place.”