What's the worst experience you've had online?

I literally just posted about this earlier today. I used to frequent the Something Awful forums. I know, I know, but I was young and at least it wasn't 4chan.

About 14 years back, I was having big issues with my partner and wasn't sure what to do, so I asked the forums for relationship advice. I actually got a fair amount of well meaning advice, but also a harasser. They initially just ripped into me in response to my request, but SA was full of trolls so I ignored them. Then they responded to another new comment I made awhile later, but the forums weren't huge. Just a coincidence, right? I continued to ignore them.

We went camping and got back a few days later. I checked my SA account and found this person had gone through my post history mocking and bullying me and had collected info to try to dox me. I was pretty carefree with what information I disclosed back then and they had a lot. They knew or at least accurately inferred: the name of the small town I lived in, the areas of town we had lived in, the year/make/model of the unusual car my now-ex drove, which university I attended and my major, where I worked and more. This all freaked me out so I reported them.

The mods' response to my reporting a user for harassing and doxxing me was, and I quote, "LOL removed". Such fond memories. I quit using SA immediately and worried for weeks that something awful would happen. Pun intended. Luckily nothing did. I have scarcely thought about SA since until someone brought it up here a few hours back.

I never get too invested in any online community, but during covid, I made a discord for some irl friends. We all knew each other irl and understood each other's sarcasm, but one of them invited someone I had never met and took great offense at any criticism of Biden I would post in the political containment channel. If I posted a critical article or unedited clip, he would start calling me an immature Brunnie Bro. Absolute toxic Facebook brainrot shit. I shortly after made a alt account with a mostly same username, passed admin privileges to that and left. Most of the people on there still are so boomer that I don't think any of thrm realize that the person in their friends list and the admin account are different.

Probably when someone advertised my discord server on 4chan

One time I was joining a meme group chat on Facebook Messenger and the admin told me I would be banned if I didn't send her pictures of my butthole. I accidentally posted those picutes to my main account later on and got my account permabanned.

Someone DM'd me my home address on a pseudonymous account I thought had no ties to my IRL identity.

Probably someone who already knew your address IRL, but then found your online account and decided to mess with you.

Siblings? Friends? Neighbors?

I doubt someone who never met you IRL could've found you address (unless you leaked it somehow).
- How very post 2001 / Windows XP SP2 of you.

When I was young I had the bright idea to take a copyrighted, published book and only change the names of the characters to an anime I liked and post it up on fanfiction.net. Totally knew what plagiarism was then. Didn't think I'd get caught.

No idea why I thought that, either... People who like reading books also like reading fanfiction. Up until then I'd had a small following, so it was traumatic when all those people immediately - and very rightly so - got mad at me. My whole ffn account got wiped clean.

However, that was back when doxxing wasn't really a big thing and everyone was satisfied with my account being wiped. No one tried to hunt me down or call my school or whatever. I just sulked around the house a lot and then made a new account with only my original fanfiction writing. I can't imagine what it'd be like trying to do that today, even if I was young like I was back then.

Getting dogpiled by assholes from the Steam Community because I made a post suggesting we get rid of the Jester award. I suggested it because the Jester award has been used as nothing but a badge from trolls who think honest reviews of games are a joke. I've had nearly 150+ of my reviews just bombarded with marks of 'X people found this review funny' and half of them were slapped with that stupid Jester badge.

Furthermore, I was gaslighted and antagonized both through DMs and openly on the forums to the point where I am now permanently banned from the Steam Forums in the general Steam community. I have no faith in Valve's sluggish ways that they'll deal with the sheer toxicity of their own community anytime soon.

And I was openly doxxed on a gossip site when that same someone openly threatened to cost me my IRL job.

I've been online for 29 years now and by this point, I've dealt with so much shit from shitty people to the point where I almost see reality as purgatory. I cannot wait until I enter my self-imposed retirement when I reach 30 years because I've watched the internet drown in shit with bots, AI, corporate enshittification and more.

How did you get permabanned from the steam forums? This reads like a tailgater blaming the person who did a brake check...
🤡 /s

Had a previously banned user from a discord I moderate join back months later with my wife’s name as their username and a photo of her as the pfp

Someone doxxed me and spread a photo of my face with the text "she said she was 18" superimposed on it (in meme format), and then spreading it in the community.

All because they took issue with a friendship I had with another user who "sounded young". Which culminated in the community leadership getting her to prove she was, in fact, not underage, "just in case" we ended up in a relationship because they "know how these things go" or something.

I once mentioned being proud of my mixed-race family and was called a racist. That was a crummy day.

Also, the day I decided maybe social activism wasn't for me.

Ah, the horseshoe theory proving nutjobs who wants apartheid because they think races can't mix because checks notes they think there will always be a problematic power imbalance so lets not even try integration
- It is so weird that people would rather see kids orphaned than raised by a white family, but it was an important lesson for me.