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The original was posted on /r/linustechtips by /u/OnlySeasurfer on 2024-12-21 12:14:23+00:00.
In response to Linus' comment on the latest WAN Show regarding bad actors at Smash Champs risking ruining the whole thing for everyone else, I wanted to share a similar experience. In fact, this dovetails nicely with Linus' policy on shadow-banning, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Here's why:
Back in 2017, Overwatch was the darling child of the eSports and streaming world. Through luck and coincidence, I ended up creating a Discord community focused on promoting grassroots eSports talent—both players and casters. The idea was simple: we would run a tournament every two weeks (we called it the "Biweekly Brawl"), which was completely free to enter. Just sign your team up, show up in the Discord on time, and we'd sort out the rest. If you wanted to cast, we would make that happen too, and stream the whole thing to a few hundred people each Saturday. Players would gain experience participating in a "professional" tournament and receive glam shots they could use to promote themselves to bigger orgs. Casters would have content for their demo reel/CV, which would hopefully open doors to bigger and better opportunities.
By all accounts, it was a big success, and I was immensely proud of it. Myself and a group of volunteers worked extremely hard, donating entire weekends to running the event. We had professional graphics and animations, custom-coded tools, multiple camera angles stitched together by a live producer, highlight reels, in-stream replays, posters, event trailers, and giveaways. In my opinion, it was the best-looking eSports event outside of the Pro League, and the community response was very positive. The Discord server gained over 10,000 members, general chat was positive and energetic, and we set up an LFG component that got hundreds of hits a day. Again, all of this was administered and moderated entirely by volunteers. There were even talks of sponsorships and branching out into other eSports titles. The trajectory of the project was very positive.
That all came to a screeching halt when a handful of players were disqualified from a tournament for verbal abuse of staff after they lost a match—a clear violation of the rules. In response, they took to the chat to bemoan anything and everything about the project. Constantly. Day in and day out, there was a constant stream of toxicity from maybe six members. It was veiled under the guise of "constructive criticism," but most of it consisted of unreasonable requests and plain rudeness. To my folly, I wanted to permit "free speech" and allow them to air their grievances. I spoke to them directly and even made some small concessions to points that seemed reasonable. Big mistake.
Instead of a truce, they just got worse. They invited their friends to the server and dominated every conversation with their negativity. People started to complain that they were getting dogpiled in general chat, and they would brigade the Twitch stream chat. Soon, the negativity spread, and others joined in. I found out they had set up a separate server specifically to coordinate their efforts to damage as much of the project as possible. I was contacted by Reddit mods warning me that they had been deleting various threads attempting to dox and harass me (thankfully, I wasn't on Reddit at the time). When I banned them, they just made new accounts and came back, complaining about tyrannical mods and abuse of power. They openly admitted to having fun trying to shut us down "for the memes," and my wife/co-creator became the target of vicious harassment and death threats.
By the time they started spamming swastikas and hentai, any fun that myself and my friends had felt for the project was completely gone. We eventually managed to purge them, but the damage was done. The community was dead. Work was ramping up at university, volunteers were understandably stepping down, and we ultimately decided to shut the whole thing down. Tournaments stopped, I deleted general chat, and left the Discord to hobble along as an LFG server, where it remains as a torched wasteland to this day.
This experience taught me a harsh but invaluable lesson about online communities: no matter how well-intentioned your efforts, there will always be people who take joy in tearing things down. Engaging with them only fuels their behavior, and their toxicity can spread faster than you’d ever expect. If I could go back, I’d enforce stricter boundaries from the outset, because giving bad actors a platform does more harm than good.
For creators like Linus, who operate on a much larger scale, I can only imagine how exhausting it must be to deal with this on a daily basis. Protecting your work and community isn’t just justified—it’s necessary. With this in mind, I fully support his approach to dealing with bad actors and maintaining a space where genuine passion and creativity can thrive.
