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Comment by astura | Hacker News Reader

Who is the "Reddit Suicide Alert?"

You can report someone if you think they're suicidal and they get a pm from reddit that says "we care about you, here's a suicide prevention hotline etc". It's used for trolling for some reason.

Someone tried this on me, so I reported it, and a couple days later got a "yep, that was harassment, we're acting on it". Pleasant suprise.

Basically a "feature" of Reddit which can be used to anonymously harass somebody on Reddit by having it send them a DM about suicide prevention.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21164687/reddit-new-suicid...

Which, just to be clear, is meant to convey the opposite obviously. "Reddit cares" is 99.99 % used by people to send others (I've seen mostly women raise this) a "kill yourself" message. Just like people who put "heartwarming" awards on posts about abuse, harassment etc.

On some subreddits every other post will be reported like this.

Meanwhile, Reddit tends to do very little about reports of even direct violence threats ala "I will find you and I will kill your children" etc. which are frequently found to "not be in violation of the terms of service".

You can report any post or comment on reddit, an one option is "self-harm or suicide" https://i.imgur.com/aGLtTeW.png I think it meant in a way that you are afraid of the person. If you are the one reported then you also get an automatic system message from reddit: someone thought you might have problems etc. Basically the suicide alert.

Anyways people use it all the time in every single sub for any unrelated thing, just because they hate you, downvoting is not enough, trolling etc. In sport subs it's very common to report opposing fans with this option for example

I comment a lot on /r/cfb and /r/nfl and I wasn’t aware of this. I don’t really trash talk, but I’m surprised at least one of my thousands of comments hasn’t elicited a suicide alert.

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