![]() He’s the former top Digg user of all time, and has kept up with the community of other power users on Digg, even though none of them have any interest in the site anymore. “Violentacrez has…certain fetishistic tastes, but as far as I know, he’s never done anything illegal,” Sorcini told me in a phone conversation yesterday. (Disclosure: In this particular episode, VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig was filling in for Devindra, but he didn’t speak during the interview.) ![]() Sorcini was an online power user in his own right, under the moniker “MrBabyMan” on Digg. The article also offered a great deal of original reporting, including the realization that Brutsch had actually been a guest on Geeks of Doom’s The Drill Down podcast, which I used to co-host with VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar and Andrew Sorcini. Instead, Chen wrote a 4,746-word feature article that humanized Brutsch as a dirty but complicated middle-aged man who became a force of online justice when he wasn’t at his day job. Luckily that didn’t happen.įor Chen, it would have been very easy to write a damning article that not only revealed Michael Brutsch as Violentacrez, but also summarized his shady activity of posting photos of underage girls, trolling the community with racial/sexist/stereotypical activity, and generally being bad at concealing his identity. It’s a long, in-depth, and balanced look at a man who Chen called “the Internet’s biggest troll,” a 49-year-old Texan whose recreational interests included posting pictures of teenage girls, baiting users with outrageous subreddits about pedophilia, racism, and necrophilia, and generally provoking outrage.Īs far as I know, freedom of speech and privacy rights have remained largely intact, which you’d never know by reading the comments on many of the top Reddit posts in the past day or two - the politics subreddit in particular.Īnd with that kind of negative social pressure beating down - the same kind of pressure that helped black out the most popular sites on the web in protest of SOPA - a lesser person might have killed the story, or at the very least toned it down. The controversy highlights the dependence that community-driven sites like Reddit have on power users whose tastes and sense of decorum they have little control over.ĭespite the threats from Reddit users, Chen published the article yesterday. ![]() In fact, Violentacrez was a powerful personality on Reddit, one who helped the site as a moderator just as much as he outraged many of its users with the content he posted. #Twitter gawker free#The reason for this was due to Gawker editor Adrien Chen’s plans to publish an in-depth article that revealed the identity of a popular Reddit user known as Violentacrez (pronounced “violent acres”), a move that many Reddit users felt would struck at their right to anonymity and free speech. Recently, moderators in over 50 of Reddit’s sub-category sites (called subreddits) banded together to manually remove any link that points to a Gawker property. MetaBeat will bring together thought leaders to give guidance on how metaverse technology will transform the way all industries communicate and do business on October 4 in San Francisco, CA. ![]()
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