Reddit's Big Ban: "Thanos Did Nothing Wrong"

9 July 2018

Avengers: Infinity War is a 2018 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics.

The story highlights how Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Captain America, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Spiderman and the rest of the Avengers unite to battle their most powerful enemy yet: Thanos.

Thanos mission is to collect the six Infinity Stones, which are immensely powerful objects tied to different aspects of the universe. Merging them all on a golden glove known as the Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos plans to use the stones' powers to inflict his twisted will on reality.

And that is to kill half of the population of the universe in order to restore balance.

This happens when Thanos snapped his fingers in the movie's climatic scene, turning many to dusts while leaving those who managed to survive the attack with plenty of food, water and space to exist.

After a few months of the movie's release, on July 2nd, it sparked a subreddit called "Thanos Did Nothing Wrong" (r/thanosdidnothingwrong) where "all are free to praise the Mad Titan for balancing the universe." The thread received more than 177,000 points (89 percent upvoted) and 6,900 comments in just one week.

In keeping with Thanos' actions in movie, the subreddit would randomly ban half of its active users.

After receiving approval from Reddit administrators to ban half of the subreddit, the moderator of the thread said:

"As you all know, I was in talks with one of the admins of Reddit. He told me that doing a massive ban the day before July 4 was a terrible idea, because many of Reddit’s engineers would be out with their families. Also, the engineers would not be prepared for a mass ban so close to it."

Since the announcement, r/thanosdidnothingwrong membership grew exponentially. And leading up to the big ban, subscribers were sharing their best and worst Thanos memes.

Even directors Joe and Anthony Russo joined by posting a video of Josh Brolin, the actor who plays Thanos, snapping his fingers.

After giving Reddit a few days in advance to prepare a bot that would help it in the banning process, July 9th was the day that the members have been waiting for.

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With the subreddit having more than 700,000 members when the ban began, the bot is estimated to be banning 10 users per second. What this means, it took around 10 hours for Reddit's Thanos to eliminate half of the subreddit's subscribers.

But here, fans are given a dedicated live-stream where they can see the elimination process, seeing the bot remove users randomly.

Those that have been turned into digital dusts, have been taking it as a point of pride.

Another special subreddit, called r/inthesoulstone was set up for those who were banned. There, they were sharing their experiences. Even beyond Reddit, the "unfortunate children of Thanos" have taken their moment of being killed or survived, to Twitter.

With hundreds of thousands of Redditors given the boot, this was one of the biggest bans in Reddit history.

The moment also caught the attention of Marvel Studios. The American motion picture studio tweeted: