A particular facet I love of the internet era is journalists reporting serious events while having to use the completely absurd usernames...

"A Facebook engineer in the response team, ramenporn..."

I remember some huge DDOS attacks like a decade ago, and people were speculating who could be behind it. The three top theories were Russian intelligence, the Mossad, and this guy on 4chan who claimed to have a Botnet doing it.

That was the start of living in the future for me.

4chan is disturbingly resourceful at times. I have heard them described as weaponized autism.

Ya, on hn it's merely productized.

That's a pretty accurate description of the site, lol.

On a side-note, I think you'll enjoy some of the videos by the YouTube 'Internet Historian' on 4chan:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvjwXhCNZcU

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiTqIyx6tBU

My favorite example of this is when I saw references to "Goatse Security" on the front page of the Wall Street Journal

This felt like something straight out of a post modern novel during the whole WSB press rodeo, where some user names being used on TV were somewhere between absurd to repulsive.

Loved it.

I believe that's the exact reason behind the pattern of horrifying usernames on reddit and imgur. It's magnificent in its surrealness.

Exactly, I'm having deja vues from Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End constantly lately.

>journalists reporting serious events

A facet I don't love is journalism devolving to reposting unverified, anonymous reddit posts.

"Discussed in Hacker News, the user that goes by the 'huevosabio' handle, stated as a fact that..."

‘He was then subsequently attacked by “OverTheCounterIvermectin” for his tweets on transgender bathrooms from several months ago’.

The problem with tweets on transgender bathrooms is that you can be attacked for them by either side at any point in the future, so the user OverTheCounterIvermectin should have known better.

I got quoted as noir_lord in the press.

My bbs handle from 30 years ago.

I'm worried about that person. I doubt Facebook will look kindly on breaking incident news being shared on reddit.

Apparently Facebook HQ didn't like how ramenporn handled the situation. His account has been deleted, as well as all his messages about the incident.

> [Reddit logo] u/ramenporn: deleted

> This user has deleted their account.

At least that department at Facebook is still working!

There never was a ramenporn.

That Ramenporn got engagement by Hate Speech

They work at facebook. Can’t imagine they have any illusions regarding their privacy/anonymity.

Curious what the internal "privacy" limitations are. Certainly FB must track reddit users : fb account even if they don't actually display it. It just makes sense.

Thanks to the GDPR at least that's easy to verify for European users.

That said, it will be interesting to read their post-mortem next year and compare it with what ramenporn wrote.

lol no one cares. we're all laughing about this too (all of us except the networks people at least...)

I hope you won't have to delete your account too :)

Well, seems like FB shutdowned his post...