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Comment by weaksauce | Hacker News Reader

Cite your work. I've seen plenty of police threads and nothing in them with any sort of highly upvoted and popular comment backing calls for violence. coupled with the fact that you can report things(and they didn't disable reporting/downvoting via css) and they have heavy moderation I don't believe you.

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This has happened several times in major subs. /r/technology was pretty bad during the Ajit Pai net neutrality stuff. Tons of death threats, including discussion of tracking down his family. People were really angry obviously but it got out of control. It's been a long time since then and there's still a mod sticky on that sub in response to the number of violent posts.

shitty people exist in any community of large number however they course corrected for that. same with r/politics there exists some shitty people but it's handled via reports and downvotes so the bad stuff falls away from view or is outright removed/banned.

r/technology did a few things to correct for it by posting that sticky, banning users, removing comments, not hiding the downvote and the report buttons so that the community can self police a bit. all of those were not done by /r/t_d. on t_d they had people actually agreeing with those posts/comments and upvoting them.

The death threats in /r/technology were also being agreed with and upvoted. This wasn't a brigade but the result of the level of political anger. Any community that has a lot of people is going to have tons of bad ones that try to rationalize violence. T_D has 700,000 people. This includes many trolls and angry people but like it or not, many that are perfectly fine with following the rules.

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