I have been the victim of some pretty huge trolling. It's hurt not just me, but my friends too. About 2 years ago, near the beginning of when I joined the fandom I did a presentation about MLP in front of my class. I was terrified and it's quite evident in the video, but I persevered and managed to finish it even though I found my palm cards hard to read due to my shaking hand and general fear. I ended up having to wing a lot of it. I was proud of my accomplishment and I uploaded it to youtube, hoping that it would be popular and stuff, like other presentations I had seen. The views came in very slowly pretty much only from my IRL friends, from in that class and ponies from this community. It was all positive and heartwarming. There were some legitimate criticisms about the delivery and that it was too long, but it only made me have some regrets about the way I did it, I never regretted doing it. The result was that my idea was picked as one of the top 4. This meant that more school resources would be available for me to make a 3 minute segment about bronies that would be shown in our final Live News Show assessment. The ones that didn't make the top 4, just had to make 1 minute segments and were just graded but not used by the school. My class was really supportive of my project and some even became bronies themselves. Then about a month later /b/ from 4chan found the presentation video and in a few days I had over 100,000 views. along with thousands of the most insulting and stupid comments I've ever read. But the presentation got a lot of views from nice people too, that called me 'brave' and 'their hero' for having the balls to do such a thing. I didn't let the trolling effect me much at first, but they got more and more crafty. One of what I am sure was a troll trying to act nice sent me a private message. He gave me a warning that if I don't take the video down, I will end up on Encyclopedia Dramatica and have my reputation ruined forever and even have trouble getting a job. He made it sound pretty scary. Over the next few days I tried to decide what to do. I started by disabling ratings and putting comments on approval only. Naturally this just instigated the trolls to call me a censor and stuff. I asked these forums for advice and got mixed reponses. But in the end I decided to leave the video up as amongst every 30 or so comments that were junk were really nice ones, basically calling me a hero for bronies. These were worth the hate, which I know were mostly lies, intolerance, ignorance and stupidity But now I had several determined trolls that followed everything I did on my channel and kept trying to piss me off. I could have blocked him but I found him entertaining and fun to argue with. But eventually the trolls got to me when they started to go onto channels that were subscribed to me and started flamming and being nasty to them. After a IRL friend told me his channel got spammed I decided it was finally time to block the trolls. After the trolling of my presentation died down I started doing ordinary video blogs for my friends and just about everyone of these were immediately posted on 4chan as they started to pick apart everything about me, from how fat I was to my occasional stammer and I got labelled autistic, gay and even nazi, just because I had a black, white and red curtain that in one of my videos that trolls were really stretching their imaginations to see what looked kind of like a swastika. But in another video you see the curtain straight on as just plain stripes. Being called a Nazi finally pissed me off enough that I put my video blog that had that curtain on private and the fact that I was drunk in that video blog made it too easy to pick on. It got even worse. As I started to film local brony meetups. Where people would be wearing pony swag and just enjoying each other's company and the trolls had a lot of fun with this and they all went on 4chan and would insult my friends now too and people who I didn't even know, but probably would not have wanted to be filmed if they knew my videos tend to end up being trolled. Anyway, I just kept doing what I was doing for over a year and just last week I found out that all of my brony meetup videos are now on many archive sites for brony haters and general sites like Spagetti.com all about making fun of autistic people. As a result of this many of my friends are now self concious about appearing in any brony related media ever again, in fact if you look at one of my latest ones, one demanded I black out his face before I post it. Even if I decided to take down the videos it's now too late as they are all available elsewhere. So yeah, I'm now a infamous brony and many bronies hate me for all the juicy media I created for the trolls. None of which was made with any ill intent. But trolls will pick out whatever they can to have fun with, from simply the fact that people are wearing pony shirts or picking out the bronies that genuinely look wierd in amongst all of the normal people and then making captioned screencaps and negative memes out of them. So that is my story about being the victim of Trolling.
There there, friend. You know there's no stopping trolls. As for the people who are afraid to be put on the web now or hate you for your innocent brony videos, they're silly. They take things too personally. The trolls are laughing at a guy in a pony shirt, not a specific person. I wish more understood this and knew it wouldn't affect them if they didn't let it.
As an autistic person, I had to put up with some pretty harsh bullying from the time I started elementary school to the time I finished high school. It hurt a lot, but in the end, I feel it made me a stronger person. These days, if I see someone being bullied on the internet or anywhere else, I go out of my way to try and stand up for them, even (especially) if I don't know them, because I know from personal experience how much it means to have even one person tell you that you're okay and not a freak. We'll never be able to stop bullying no matter how much the politicians and educators try to, but if we can make the victims of bullying realize that not everyone is a heartless jerk and there are good people out there, then we've done our job as well as we can.
Doesn't sound like trolling, it's straight up cyber-bullying. I can't believe how far they're taking it. You haven't gotten any hate like this in real life have you? This is all simply bound to the internet right? Nevertheless, it would suck if people were using your image and your virtual property to slander and humiliate you. Surely something can be done about this.
If I remember correctly, you had posted a similar story about this when it happened on here Of course that could be my memory playing tricks on me, as it always does, so I can't say for sure you did and if you did I hadn't said anything on the matter Anyways, tis the internet being the internet, you got your good side and your bad side I didn't even know such people would go to an extreme extent to show their distaste over a simple thing as ponies and the bronies Regardless, continue on doing what you do there, mate. You got some pretty good videos up on your channel Continue being yourself, and don't let a bunch of immature "le epic trolls" get ya down Stride on through and look to the awesome times
This is a perfect example of trolling going to far. Try not to let them get to you, 99% of /b/tards are jerks anyway. These guys seemed very determined to go out of their way to attack you, but then again I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't got anything better to do. If I was you, I'd create a new YouTube channel and leave the old one alone. Hopefully trolls will think that you've stopped posting videos (which is what they want for some reason) and they'll leave you alone. If you inform your friends, they can remove any links with your old account and they'll be protected as well. I doubt that they'll find your new channel for a while, and if they do find your new channel, report them straight away. While it can be fun to talk to them, it's better off if they don't exist on YouTube at all. Also, don't worry too much about the Encyclopedia Dramatica thing, no-one takes that site seriously and, as long as you didn't mention any personal data and cut off all links from that page, you can't be identified from it so your reputation should be fine. EDIT: Also remember that you are a much, much, much better person than any of these trolls. I could describe the average /b/tard, but I don't want to bore you to prove a point that you probably already know.
Yes, I recall this. I was browsing /b/ and saw your video on bronies there, and it was basically a call to arms to troll you. I'm glad you're still around though. Not many people can withstand a full-blown attack from 4Chan. Especially against /b/. There were probably thousands of people out to get you down. But this is also why you should always, always, always, set your comments to Approval Only if it's ever anything close to a documentary about anything internet related. Especially bronies. I'm glad you got some praise for it though. I'm glad you're back and still kicking.
There are sites for making fun of autistic people?! As a person with Aspergers, I find this infuriating. When will the normies understand that we're just, well, better than them?
Ramza is right, you should be proud of yourself. /b/ has infamously raided many things and ruined them, yet you have faced them and you're still going strong.
We're not better than them, nor are we worse. We're just different. Sadly, some people can't stand people who are different. I feel sorry for them. They must be really unhappy with who they are if they have to tear others down to make themselves feel good.
This. Acting superior doesn't do any good. This goes for them and us. Sent from my DROID3 using Tapatalk 2
Yeah I talked about this in 2011 when I was active then, although it has gone a bit further since then, over time. The main problem now is that there are a few local bronies in particular that absolutely hate my guts, because of them being the victim of trolling from my photos and videos. However these people are in the minority in the group and my reputation is mostly positive or neutral. I think they have just tended to get more insulted by the trolls then I have and they tend to just blindly follow what they say about me and they are the kind of people who would pick on those that are different themselves to themselves. I think I've become stronger and all the trolls have done is made me more determined to not let them win. I am an aspiring film-maker and I'm not going to let them discourage me from what doing what I love. Besides, not even the deliberate defacing of my presentation video is quite as much as the praise I have gotten for one of my PMVs in particular. In fact all this attention has brought many new people to my channel that have become fans. I actually am autistic, but I never admit it to them, otherwise I could give them ammo. But I believe that autistic people are not any worse then anyone else, they are only different. All autism is, is a difference in the way the brain is wired and it's been proven through studies that autistic people tend to be a lot more creative and intellectual, normally at the price of social skills. If it was not for autistic people there would be a lot less art in the world and less crazy scientists that have pushed technology ahead by leaps and bounds. It's for this reason that I am highly offended by the casual use of the word as a insult all over 4chan and how whenever they see doing something a little out of their pre-conceived notion of normal, they must automatically be autistic, or gay.
I remember this. It's pathetic the length people will go to try and ruin others. Trolls just love the safety of being behind a damn computer screen. They couldn't say half of the things they do in person. Good to see that even after all this time you haven't let it get you down.
Actually, Autism is something you're born with and despite what some people say, there is no cure and many of us wouldn't want to be cured anyway. We're like The X-Men that way. You are right, though, that part of it has to do with trouble picking up social cues (though we can learn to). Another part of it is that many of us are VERY literal-minded and quite often don't understand sarcasm (again, that's something we have to learn). On the positive side, it's usually very easy for us to concentrate on whatever we're doing and stay focused, sometimes for hours at a time. I don't know about anyone else, but if something sparks my interest, I go out of my way to learn everything I can about it (like when Lilo And Stitch came out, I read tons of stuff about Hawaiian history and culture). Have you ever seen The Big Bang Theory? Jim Parsons has said that no one ever told him Sheldon is autistic, but he assumed it from the way Sheldon was written so that's how he plays him and it's actually pretty accurate. I'm more like Sheldon than I care to admit, although I try to be more like Leonard when I'm in public.
Very glad to hear that you not only survived 4chan's /b/ raids, but also kept going stronger than before after them. To be honest, I'm pretty inspired by your determination to not let trolls win and get the best of you. Also, I hope everything calmed down as of now (as in, no more raids, harassment, etc.).
I remember you starting a thread asking us how to deal with the trolls, Setzer. I looks like you've come out of that conflict alright. The fact that there are websites for making fun of autistic people.... ugh. That disgusts me. As Temple Grandin once said: "I am different, not less." I was with you up until you made it sound like all normal people are the same and that you are clearly superior. You aren't. No one person is genetically "superior" to any other. That's some eugenicist stuff right there, man. My little brother has Autism, so happily I've had the chance to learn a bit about it. Autism is technically classified as a Neurological disorder, which means that it's effects are developmental as well as psychological. The common consensus is that Autism is something you're born with and something that stays with you your entire life, though much of its negative effects can be worked past. We don't really know if it's genetic or not. It's different for everybody, but there are some unifying effects that most Autistic people experience. It's important to recognize that Autism can have an effect on how someone is physically. My little brother walked on his toes all the time, and now the tendons in his ankle are shorter than they should be. So he has to undergo a casting process where he needs to slowly stretch his tendons degree by degree. This is just one example of the many ways in which Autism can affect someone, making them profoundly different from people who we consider "normal." Motor skills can also be affected. You rock, AspieHooves. I agree with everything you've said in this thread.
Hmm, I had a similar problem with my tendons. I had no idea it had anything to do with autism. I thought my feet were just physically different. Although once again, due to the strange way I walked when I was younger I had particularly strong legs. When I practised Teakwondo, My kicks were so hard I had to either hold back or I had to only have adults hold the kick cushion for me. Manic depression is another disorder that I think I have. However that too has it's advantages, Manic depressive people are highly creative and the The leading scientist in the field of genetics is manic depressive herself. I saw this in a documentary about Genetics and they were talking about how we have the technology to alter someone's genetic code at birth in order to prevent things like Autism and Manic Depression. Naturally She is highly oppose to this being done because these so called 'Disorders' would reduce the variety we get in humanity and along with them the X-Men like extremes both good and bad that people can have in their brain chemistry. I would never want to change who I am, for all I know being normal would take away from my individuality and make me a completely different person, that I wouldn't even like.
Yeah, well the idea is that the autistic person in question prefers to stand on their toes for a certain reason (usually it just feels better, and that has to do with the feedback they get from the pressure of having all their weight on just their toes) and so they do it all the time. Then it ends up effecting a change in the development of their ankle tendons. There are advantages to be found everywhere. Did you watch the superbowl halftime show? Beyonce's guitarist had a guitar that shot out sparks. Those were allegedly invented by an autistic person. Supposedly, he started out by making them by hand for one band in particular. Just a fun fact. You might be interested in ideas like "Disability Studies" and "Normalization." Check them out, and maybe take some classes on them. They're totally fascinating. In response to the statement that I bolded: more power to you, man. From what I've seen and researched, some factors that are supposed to cause/affect Autism would affect the baby's development in the womb (ex: the age of the mother) but could also be attributed to genetics (ex: the age of the father). There's a lot we still don't know.
I always stand on my toes when I'm not wearing shoes because it makes movement more precise, agile, and maneuverable than striking with the heel. Sent from my DROID3 using Tapatalk 2
