July 29th, 2014 seemed like an ordinary day to most redditors. People were posting, people were reading and discussing different topics. Until /u/Z_Dubs posted a link to /r/SubredditDrama, which brought attention to a thread in /r/AdviceAnimals, where /u/Unidan got into an argument with another user, /u/Ecka6, over the difference between Jackdaws and crows. All of /u/Unidan’s fans started to downvote /u/Ecka6 into the negatives. What happened next is what lead to /u/Unidan’s shadow ban.

July 30th, 2014, a blog post by reddit Admin, /u/Deimorz, explaining how reddit works is posted to /r/Blog. People started to get curious as to why /u/Unidan was banned. This is when /u/CupCake1713 answers the big question with,

“He was caught using a number of alternate accounts to downvote people he was arguing with, upvote his own submissions and comments, and downvote submissions made around the same time he posted his own so that he got even more of an artificial popularity boost. It was some pretty blatant vote manipulation, which is against our site rules.”

At this time, /u/Unidan had made another account, /u/UnidanX, to explain why he did this,

“Completely true, mainly used to give my submissions a small boost (I had five “vote alts”) when things were in the new list, or to vote on stuff when I guess I got too hot-headed. It was a really stupid move on my part, and I feel pretty bad about it, especially because it’s entirely unnecessary. Completely understandable catch on the side of the admins, so good work for them! I’ve already deleted the accounts and I won’t be doing that again, obviously. I always knew I’d go down in a hail of crows, but who knew it’d be on the internet?”

At first, it was met with almost 2000 upvotes and 8 gildings. As the day went on, people’s opinions were changing. People felt duped, cheated and lied to. His 2000 up votes quickly turned to down votes. And /u/Ecka6 had started to be upvoted after what Unidan had done was brought to light. At this point, he went offline for a couple weeks. And came back with a not very warm welcome. But if there is one good thing that came out of all of this, it would have to be the Jackdaw copypasta. So, thanks Unidan.

Edit: added the vote brigading against /u/Ecka6.