[bloopernova]

Reddit users are like a swarm of zombies sometimes. If something negative gets shared about a person or company, you can be fairly certain that there will be hundreds to tens of thousands of Redditors expressing their anger. That anger, whether deserved or not, results in everything from DDOS attacks, phonecalls from thousands of people, people contacting employees at home, death threats, etc etc.

There's also the tale of the Boston Marathon bombing, where some "over-enthusiastic" Reddit users took it upon themselves to solve the crimes based on footage from security cameras. The Reddit Detectives managed to hound and accuse the wrong people: https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil...

So Reddit is very anxious to avoid unleashing the zombie horde again, hence its very strict policies about naming companies or individuals.

[Nicksil]

That's far from a Reddit-specific thing. Granted, it occurs on Reddit, but the behavior is observed throughout all "social media."

[bloopernova]

Yes, it ties in to the outrage culture that has developed on the internet. A lot of people now seem to treat others as NPCs in a video game, to be abused or treated in any way that trips the "player's" dopamine.

I hope that it burns itself out and the web as a whole moves on from it.

[i4blux]

Calling those who did the Boston Marathon detective work "Reddit" is like calling those who hailed the NZ mosque shooter "4chan".

[baking]

I think it is worse than that. I was actually actively involved in the process of looking through those photos on /r/Boston at the time and the whole "red herring" story was not organic to that process and just seemed to be something that an outside group of trolls (maybe outside of Reddit or outside of r/Boston) decided to bandwagon and got it picked up by the media. Nobody really involved in the process really bought into it. I always feel like the "internet detectives" got a bad rap.

Maybe the lesson to be learned is that the media needs to know what they are dealing with before going with the "Reddit says" storyline.

[bloopernova]

I didn't know that, and I'm sorry that I only read this response after my comment's edit window had closed.

[bloopernova]

I did edit my post a little after reading your response. My apologies for misrepresenting the actions of a smaller subset of Redditors as being those endorsed by the entire userbase.