Another fun fact: You can use it yourself. Just spread it on the floor where you have a bug infestation and it'll kill them. It's harmless if you don't ingest it (in fact, I believe there's even some that's food grade).

If you have bedbugs, you can surround your bed with it, and it's really effective. It also takes out cockroaches, I believe.

Reddit's far left can be pretty toxic too. As an old liberal myself, I don't believe that there are any good kinds of hate or discrimination, but if you argue against that kind of crap, the absolute worst people come out to defend it. A good chunk of my negative interactions have been with those people.

That being said, the Eternal September is real. I don't know anyone in real life who actually thinks like that. The trouble is, if you have ten million users, a tenth of a percent of them could be assholes and that's still 10,000 obnoxious assholes.

Why would users want to harm Reddit employees?

Realistically, because some people are dumb. It's the same reason people harass actors for playing characters they don't like.

And frankly, reddit shielded the_donald when they were openly breaking the rules about vote manipulation in such a huge way that they dominated /r/all.

There's a private subreddit I'm a member of that I'll probably stick around for a while on. It's one where they kick people out if they don't participate for a week, so I'll have an interesting sample of how many active redditors are leaving.

Reddit has been crappy for years now, and a lot of people have wanted to leave but didn't have anywhere to go. Now that there's somewhere else, people will continue to trickle out as they get tired of it. It doesn't need to all happen at once -- in fact, reddit doesn't need to shut down. It just needs viable alternatives with a critical community mass, and we're there now.

...or completely inadequate.