When you add all this up, what do we get? 36. Also, the inevitable conclusion: /r/gaming, we have been trolled. A zero-day account showed up with a lot of claims and no proof, but knew all the right things to say to rile up the community in their revulsion for both the XBox One and corporate interference in our free community. The post was explicitly designed to trigger rage at heavy-handed and Orwellian tactics, and it did exactly that.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with such crowdsourced rage, innocent bystanders got caught in the crossfire and were subjected to abuse and harassment that they'd done nothing to deserve. Just because they had said something nice—or even neutral—about Microsoft or its latest console, they found themselves at the receiving end of dox dumps, threatening PMs, and crowds of downvote brigades annihilating their user account all over reddit.
Friends, we can do better than that. We're a big community, and it shouldn't be so easy for someone to register a new account, type a couple paragraphs, and get a three-million-strong pitchfork mob going for funsies and lulz. When someone comes along with claims like that, we should take a cue from /r/IAmA — ask for proof. Demand proof. If we had done that in the beginning, we'd have quickly found out the whole thing was a fake, and saved this community from the last day full of headache and front page shenanigans.
In the end, no, we're not being manipulated by Microsoft. We were manipulated by something much less impressive: one person with no proof and another with a lie. I hope they got the cheap laughs they were after, because we sure as shit delivered one hell of a show.
We can do better than that. We owe it to ourselves to do better than that. I hope, going forward, we do.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
