Robert “GallowBoob” Allam Speaks Out On The Recent Reddit Drama, What’s Next After Stepping Back From The Platform And How To Improve The Future Of The Internet

ossibly the most famous, or infamous depending on your stance, Redditor to ever come out of the social aggregation platform, “GallowBoob” is a well-known name among many online. His real name is Robert Allam, and although he’s mostly recognized as having the most karma on Reddit out of any single user, there’s a lot more to his story than a mere collection of internet points. Allam recently made the difficult decision to temporarily step back from Reddit after finding himself the target of backlash on the site, so we sought him out to learn more about what exactly happened, and why he decided to withdraw from the platform he's so passionately involved in. Tracing back his origins with Reddit and the internet as a whole, we dove into his backstory leading up to the recent controversy and what the future holds for GallowBoob.

Q: Hey, Rob. So I know there’s been a lot going on for you in the last couple of weeks, but before we dive into that, I’d like to begin with some of your backstory. Can you fill us in on your background a bit?

A: First of all, thank you for reaching out and for the opportunity to speak directly through your platform. My name is Rob Allam. I’m a half Greek, half Lebanese 34-year-old guy who mainly speaks French and English. I’ve been living and working in the UK for some eight years now. I studied Landscape Architecture (Manchester, UK) and got a master’s in the field (London) and spent about eight years in the industry. During this time, I went from being a contractor to a landscape architecture university professor and assistant (American University Of Beirut, Lebanon). After my introduction to Reddit, I was fortunate enough to be invited into the media industry where I’ve been working ever since, going on seven years now.

I grew up between Lebanon and Greece, playing alone in Lebanon’s forests alongside my army of dogs and cats (some rescues, some local wildlings, we did not have animal control back then) or spending time on the beach shores of Greece with my family on that side of the world. The civil war in Lebanon and instability in the region prompted my family -- like so many others -- to move around a lot when I was a kid, as we relocated back and forth a few times between both Lebanon and Greece. My parents spent years struggling to find work between a war-torn country and an economically collapsing one, trying to find a stable place to have a family. We never did find a stable place, geographically speaking, and kept moving around. These days, we’re separated physically, but more connected than ever. My folks live in Greece, my sister lives in London, and I’m constantly shuffling between London and North UK. We still make space to meet at least once a year when we can, our meetups usually happen in Greece and are the source of much gratitude. I am still making space for my place to settle in, build a home, and grow old … enjoying the journey in the meantime.

Q: What about your early history with the internet? What sites or platforms were you most active on before Reddit, and what sorts of things were you interested in online?

A: I’ve always been a gamer nerd. Played or owned all early platforms, from the Atari to the Sega Mega Drive, to all the PlayStations (PCs were too expensive to keep up with and still are). I learned to speak English by playing Final Fantasy VII on the PS1 back in the day, we used to take English at school, but it wasn’t a priority and no one really bothered with it. I actively tried to learn it better through school and self-research simply to be a better gamer. I would get immersed in these mesmerizing role-playing experiences that, back then, were revolutionary. I was, and still am, an avid manga/anime nerd, I’ve had about 300-plus books at my peak growing up. Some were in French, some were in English. I am thankful to have grown up before the internet, and I clearly recall when it became a thing. I had no use for it past learning better English and looking up game cheats (I promise I don’t do that anymore). Not long after the internet became a thing, I recall getting introduced to a text-based, manga and anime forum in French. It was simply a space to discuss nerd culture and I quickly became very active on it, meeting a lot of like-minded people I called friends back then. I am still friends on social media with a lot of them. If I recall, I also quickly became a top user on that platform with its own “activity points” that were some form of metrics to keep track of your posts and comments on the forum. After that, I got heavily into World Of Warcraft (WoW), and some of the WoW-related strategy forums. I was leading raids and trying to take down world firsts. Looking back, I’m awestruck by the sheer amount of hours I invested in that game and all the prep around it. Later, I fell into Imgur. First, as a user leaving comments and consuming content, sometimes posting things I found interesting online, I somehow stood out on there and became close with the people behind the platform, even going as far as setting up the London Imgur meetup in Hyde Park some years ago. I sort of abandoned Imgur after discovering Reddit. A friend of mine, who was an avid WoW player, introduced me to Reddit one day during our WoW sessions, which mainly consisted of drinking beer and playing WoW nonstop.

Q: So before you started the “GallowBoob” account and became known as a famous Redditor, were you already active on the platform in other ways, did you have any accounts before that? If so, what was your experience with Reddit initially?

A: As I said previously, yes I was active on Imgur first, aggregating content without any goals and mostly consuming meme culture that was, back then at least, condensed into one space (Imgur). However, that was abandoned after I met Reddit and its subreddit-specific culture. I started on r/photoshopbattles, taking part in the actual photoshop battles almost daily. I amassed about 500,000-plus total karma points simply by creating original photoshop submissions and taking part in a lot of back and forth “battles” there. I met a lot of extremely talented people and learned a lot of tricks on Photoshop just being active there. It was a great source of education and fun. It was also an escape. In the screenshot below, you can see the amount of participation and vote flairs linked to my account on the subreddit, you can also see a karma breakdown of my activity on the subreddit, posts/comments respectively. I slowly started to discover more niche communities and subreddits the more time I’d spend on Reddit, and before I knew it, I was actively aggregating content I found outside of the platform onto relevant subreddits. You can see my activity scale up on the Karma Leaderboard site:

A: The discovery of Reddit and its daily flow of content, while not at all always original or originating from Reddit initially, and all the live discussions that took place under every thread was a fascinating find for a gamer/anime/online forum nerd like me.

Q: On October 7th, 2014, you launched the GallowBoob account on Reddit. At that time, what was your plan for it, and how did you come up with that name?

A: In all honesty, the initial plan was nonexistent, past simply being a snarky, witty Photoshop artist on r/photoshopbattles. I’ve heard the “Why did you choose that username?” question asked so many times, not that I blame anyone for asking it! The blunt reality behind the username was nothing more than using my then-WoW account called “Gallow” and adding a “Boob” for relevance. When I say “for relevance,” I mean there are so many witty and hilarious usernames on Reddit and online in general … I tried okay. I really tried (and I failed) to nail a funny username without taking a step back and realizing that my username basically calls for the hanging of a tit, a boob’s gallow -- an image none of us needs in their lifetime, yet here we are imagining it. I’m not sorry. Back then, there was no goal behind the account, just like today, there is no real goal behind the account past an online presence in aggregation and moderation of content. However, regardless of no clear goals behind it, this account and Reddit as a platform would reshape my life as I knew it.

Q: In less than a year, you accumulated over 5.5 million karma and your posts reached the front page almost every day. Were you specifically seeking karma with your posts, or was it more so just a natural occurrence? If so, why did you target that goal?

A: If you pay attention on Reddit, you will notice a lot of recurring usernames posting popular content to certain communities. Active link aggregator accounts on Reddit are often referred to as “karmawhores,” by Redditors of course. Highlighting the fact that they would “whore” themselves out for karma if it got them the imaginary internet points. It’s a pretty silly, yet funny, word if you take a moment to think about it, however, it is often used divisively. Some users will say it in jest, others will use it as a form of accusation of an online crime one would commit -- the act of “karmawhoring” imaginary internet points. If we took a dive into the intricate psychology behind this polarized behavior, we would end up with a book or two, so I’ll spare you that pseudo-study for now. All you need to realize is that the more popular posts or comments you make, the more karma points you accumulate, the more visibility you get on the platform by your posts and your username being in front of everyone day in, day out. It raises questions as to why someone would do that, and rightfully so. After all, what is the internet without our misdirected curiosity? Consistent posting on Reddit does not favor your algorithm or anything, contrary to all other social platforms that require you to consistently post content to build audience habits and be favored by the algorithm (if you take a hiatus on your Facebook group and get posting again, you will notice a drop in reach where a lot of users won’t be seeing your posts for algorithmic reasons shrouded in mystery but laced with forced habit building on all ends, user and publisher alike). Posting popular content consistently on Reddit only gets you noticed by the most curious users on the platform, and you will go ignored by 99.99 percent of audiences consuming content on Reddit.

I love and hate this analogy, but bear with me. Most of us can relate to scores in arcades and video games being the driving force behind training and grinding your skills at a certain game until you can get a high score and feel fulfilled in the time and effort you spent trying. If you think of Reddit karma as a score, which it is, you can imagine why some people will find motivation in grinding that score up. At the end of the day, karma points are a mere reflection of your activity metrics on the platform, yet it definitely has a certain gratifying gamification aspect of “collecting” those points if you were to objectively look at the psychology of a Redditor. Often users will take pride in the number of karma points they have or get trolled for the number of points they have, which is a reflection of the amount of time they’ve invested in the platform. I was, and still somewhat am, hooked on that score. As imaginary as it is, it’s a counter that keeps ticking upwards. Granted, if you think of Reddit as a game, I’ve played that game over and over for the past five years, gotten the highest score there is to get, and regardless of that, kept playing every single day nonstop. I would even go as far as to say that if Reddit was a game, I played it on hard mode, on impossible mode, on any and all modes there is to play it on -- having been as visible as I was and as active as I am meant a lot of curious eyeballs on me asking all sorts of questions there are to ask, all rightfully so of course. I need to find a new game to play, and that’s more or less why I took a step back lately for all the right reasons (you can see more info on that here). I need a new challenge, a new experience, and honestly, I simply need more purpose in my time spent online or offline. I’m tackling mental health awareness and its ongoing (and much needed) fight on Reddit, taking it upon myself to help myself and others on that platform any way I can. I’m currently working on plans with some big names and existing support organizations out there doing some amazing work elevating the fight for mental health awareness online -- more to come soon.

Q: Due to this unprecedented accumulation of karma, what was going through your mind when you noticed that your posts were doing so well? Was it something you expected, or were you surprised by the reception?

A: The one thing that happens when you get a viral post anywhere on any platform is the flood of comments and activity that translates into attention, in real-time. We react to that with a gratified feeling of purpose, a temporary one mind you. I guess our brains will release some dopamine at the thought of syncing with so many other humans in real-time and seeing the fruit of your actions in the forms of online social engagements and impressions. For me, that was partly it at first, however, what kept me going was simply noticing that Reddit is a funnel for ALL MEDIA to feed and report back on. What does that mean? I would often see something moderately trending on a cool website or on another platform, package it (turn a video into a GIF, crop a few pictures into a collage, make an album of photos, etc.) title it, and share it to a certain subreddit only to see it blow up and ripple online for the coming weeks. The online media cycle is as such, something trends somewhere, and then it ripples on all and every social platform, through organic posts, group posts, publishing posts, or, of course, by getting siphoned through the TV and journalistic media cycles. Without getting into case studies and details, I’ll just give you one example among hundreds. What would happen is the following, I’d randomly stumble on content I had not yet personally seen on Reddit, I would then prep that content, package it and title it, then post it to relevant niche subreddits -- be it r/pics or r/funny or r/gifs back in the day. That post would trend on Reddit, it would ripple onto different subreddits reposted and crossposted by other users, it would then get picked up by viral publishing media like Buzzfeed, Unilad, Mashable, etc. and pushed on their own social platforms. This would, in turn, amplify this story or piece of content into spreading even further, often reaching mainstream news media like CNN, The Washington Post, etc., and, of course, on local news media and TV. If the story originated in X town, their local news media would be all over it in real-time after it got popular on Reddit. This is still the ongoing cycle of viral or mainstream media, be it originating on Reddit or any other platform. However, Reddit was and still is a curating platform, not a publishing platform. That means that users are curating good/bad content in real-time by up/downvoting it towards or away from the top (the front page, r/all, the popular algorithm on Reddit). No other social platform lets you do that. Instead, other platforms are a publisher format that allows you to build a following and then target them with your content, not to curate, but to consume. Today, Facebook groups have shifted away from their old algorithms and tapped into a more Reddit-oriented format of curation vs. publishing -- as all platforms converge into each other in the natural order of our online fabric. I guess you could say my motivation was a misplaced grind of imaginary points with a silver lining of witnessing my default impact of the news and media cycles I had absolutely no understanding of back in the day. It taught me a lot and made me see all the pros and cons of our online generation and the tools at hand.

Q: Following up from that, what do you think was the secret behind having so many successful posts, and what strategies did you use to ensure they would perform well?

A: Practice, repetition and observation, it really is a process just like anything else. The more time you invest in it, the more things become clear. If anyone wants to become the next GallowBoob, they should start posting frequently and look for opportunities to improve daily. However, I would strongly advise against it, not in fear of getting “dethroned” (it’s going to happen considering I am actively posting less and less on Reddit) but simply because your efforts could be invested elsewhere and in a more structured way. Meaning, instead of doing it without any goals like I did and still do to this day, you should instead grow a niche subreddit of your own or a specific social page/group relating to your interests, no matter what they are (note: please do more good out there than harm, online or offline, spread positivity vs. hate). I constantly get messages from individuals who are actively aggregating content on Reddit or moderating communities, asking me how they can redirect their careers into media or anything that can pay their bills, and while I wish I had the solution, I simply don’t. I’ve actively done my best to network individuals in the hopes of them learning a trade or being able to land a job in their field of choice, and I have always used my own contacts to help others any chance I get, all in transparency and good faith. However, I may have gotten lucky myself and made a name on Reddit that allowed me to be recognized in the media world. That allowed me to find a few jobs in this industry and learn 95 percent of what I know today through hard work and various teams and organizations I worked with. The other 5 percent I owe to Reddit, and the internet as a whole. I still am learning new things every day and, quite frankly, will never stop learning, and I want to be there for others the way I wish someone was there for me during my process -- in support and with real-life advice regarding these newly emerging and fast-changing technologies we are experiencing for the first time, be it the internet or our global media landscape.

Q: Alright we may be backtracking here a little, but I’d like to discuss your career path before you became focused on Reddit/online content. I remember reading that you were a landscaper back in the day, so how did you transition from that to making a career out of your Reddit success?

A: I believe a Forbes article captures this better than I could put back into words right now. Alexis Ohanian was possibly the catalyst behind my professional career in media, without him lifting a single finger or offering me anything other than his advice and attention for a brief moment. See below screenshot:

A: Today, Alexis is a friend, I even am friends with his dad after we met with them both and a friend of his in London while they were visiting in 2016. u/ShittyWatercolour (who is a good friend of mine, we often did Reddit meetups together) also joined us and we had an incredible night with some incredible people. We just went for dinner, drinks, and then a tipsy traditional karaoke booth in Chinatown. One thing I’ll never forget from that evening is the voice on that man, Alexis is not only incredibly tall and an awesome human being, but his voice is out of this world. If he had not paved his path in online media, he would have been a singer. I have no doubts about it. I met Alexis during an interview I had with Reddit over who I was and why I was doing what I do on the platform (growing exponentially fast and being on the front page every single day ever since I made the account). It was for a discontinued segment of their Upvoted blog. Alexis was the one who surprised me in my interview, and then we became friends because we are both nerds at our core.

A: I’ve been working with various media companies throughout the years, some for identifying viral stories and video content to report back on (Unilad, Bored Panda), some to buy viral videos from to then sell to marketers and media companies (Jukin Media), and today I am working in Esports. I have some personal projects that are currently in the making that will get announced soon too, some commercial and some simply non-profit related. I learned that you can’t expect good without doing good yourself, real-life karma if you will.

Q: Do you remember the specific moment you realized you could actually do something with the success you were having on the platform?

A: My initial role at Unilad/The Lad Bible was simply due to my knowledge of viral media. In other words, my marketable skill was to identify viral content before it spread so that the companies I was working with could shotgun publish these stories before their competition, for all the obvious reasons. In a way, it was identifying content from Reddit, and any other sources I used to find content on. These sources vary from endless bookmarked blogs and websites to other platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, Pinterest, etc., to simply using certain trackers and tools that distill social media feeds, “social listening” if you will. Some people thought I got employed there to “shill” on Reddit, but the truth was I could simply identify content from Reddit (and all my other sources), not the other way around.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by NEMR (@nemrcomedy) on May 6, 2020 at 9:35pm PDT

Q: As you’re familiar with, many Redditors have reacted negatively to your account over the years, calling you a “karma whore” and things like that. When did you notice these types of reactions, how did you respond to them, and why do you think they had that mindset surrounding GallowBoob?

A: Having started the account with no idea what I was doing, I simply had absolutely no training to deal with the amount of attention and hoards of users coming my way in curiosity. I can honestly say that I learned a lot by being on Reddit and by making mistakes along the way, as we all do. It is our human nature, if you don’t learn from your mistakes and actively try to better yourself, then why get out of bed in the morning. The one thing I wish I knew back then was that no matter what the reasons are if someone is trolling you in bad faith or is actively harassing you, the first thing you do is ignore it. Don’t feed the trolls or engage them at all -- let alone try to reason with them as a human being, because they will use your words out of context and send even more noise your way regardless of whether you are to blame or not. It is the internet, boredom and anonymity mixed together that are very volatile. One thing I really regret is not fully understanding the disdain Reddit has for advertisers and big brands. In time, I sure did get that. You can’t blame a self-curated platform for gatekeeping its spaces away from advertisers and corporate shills trying to sell you a product by pandering to your habits and likes. Reddit is sort of the last line of defense, or rather was, since today it’s shaping to become a more traditional social platform than what it initially was built to be -- a bastion of “free speech” (just like anything else in life, you adapt and evolve or you get left behind) against a peppered experience in advertisements you have on TV and on all the other mainstream social platforms like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter.

So my big fuck up was seeing Netflix’s new logo trending on Twitter and everywhere else on social media as a cool new graphic that was well designed and oddly satisfying in the way it pops up and then fades back out. After seeing that video trending, I decided it would be a good idea to turn it into a GIF and post it to a subreddit called r/oddlysatisfying. I was also, and still am, a moderator on that subreddit (which can be seen as a conflict of interest if I’m pandering as a shill with brands and getting paid for it, but lying to my co-mods and our audience). I was clearly in the wrong that day and, quite frankly, an idiot for not having put two and two together before making that post, and before it blew up and was on Reddit’s front page. As soon as it started to trend, we saw a flood of comments questioning if this was an ad, rightfully so considering the nature of the post, then these comments started to point their fingers at the OP (original poster), me, again rightfully so. It quickly escalated and accusations started to fly, uncivil behavior flooded the thread and other subreddits started to make posts accusing me of being a paid shill (it looked so obvious I can’t blame anyone who thought I was). Coincidentally, we have a civility rule on r/Oddlysatisfying that hints at a civil discourse or else mods will intervene and moderate/issue bans, etc. What happened that day was my team of moderators trying to enforce our civility rule by moderating these angry threads attacking me, in due subreddit rules, and in turn adding fuel to the fire that was calling me out as a shill. Obviously this looked like an attempt of a subreddit moderator to advertise on their sub, then censor the users calling it out, which blew up on Reddit exponentially with the weight my username holds and the anti-shill spirits of Reddit. While I wish a discourse was possible there, simply asking me if I was paid and I could answer, “Oh hell no, and I get why you would ask. Fuck this post, I’ll delete it,” this is the internet we’re talking about after all. Things quickly caught on fire and conspiracy theories were emerging faster than you could count them. It was terrifying because some people went as far as to try and doxx me, hack my account, sent me an endless amount of death threats and other abuse because they felt censored and wronged by an active user and a moderator -- all of it makes sense. I even wrote to Netflix urging them to clear my name since I didn’t know what else to do to alleviate the conspiracies that were calling me a corporate shill. Someone reached out and wrote an article about the whole ordeal, trying to remain objective, and I think they did a good job, but by then the damage was done. I wish for two things: 1 -- that I knew better as to make a branded post for free and get the heat when Netflix or other giants don’t even need that extra marketing at all and have budgets of millions upon millions to do that. 2 -- when I saw the users get angry, I should have deleted the post and apologized saying, “You are right, it was stupid of me, and fuck Netflix.” But all I can do is learn from this and move on with my life.

Q: In addition to those, some have accused you of “shilling” for companies and profiting off posts. How have people or companies approached you to use your Reddit account for such advertising purposes, and did you ever agree to use the account in that manner? Why, or why not?

A: Throughout the years, I got a lot of requests for product reviews, often questionable products, and blatant requests of “can you please make my story/product go viral for $xxx?” all of which were actively ignored -- simply because Reddit is not all the other platforms, I can’t act as an influencer and shove paid product reviews down the throats of my audience because I don’t even have that audience. The platform is constantly self-curating, it is not a publishing platform, as I said before. So that format of advertising would not even work on Reddit. And if I had to sell out my integrity for a one-time payment, I would have lost everything I built indirectly for some money. Quite frankly, my name and account are priceless when it comes to this. Regardless of the number of conspiracy theories around my Reddit activity, my real-life person, and my intentions, I’ve always been transparent about any change I had to, be it publicly or privately on Reddit, or via articles and podcasts. And I will continue to be transparent because I can.

Q: Others have also accused you of using your moderator powers to delete comments about these controversies. Is there any truth to these claims?

A: The censorship idea is appealing to a lot of people online since it’s actively happening everywhere we look whether we want to admit it or not (political discourse and co.). However, these accusations, while also justified in curiosity and motive, often refer to either people getting banned for breaking site-wide and subreddit rules (that are public for all to see) often having to do with civility, or simply are people showing up with the worst intentions (example: the good old “kill yourself” feedback in dissent online). This comic by a friend of mine and avid Redditor SrGrafo encapsulates this experience quite tremendously.

A: I can’t ever hide anything on Reddit, and never would attempt to, because from the user base to the mod teams and everything in-between, you simply are fighting a losing battle trying to hide any flagrant behavior. Whenever I got singled out and attacked, users often ignored and forgot the entire mod team in place actively assisting alongside me, but my username holds the pull, theirs doesn’t, so when conspiracies or outrage posts happen, they often rely on my name to get them the attention they seek. And it works.

Q: More recently, a list of some of Reddit’s top subs and their mods has been circulating online, making the claim that many of the platform’s communities are under the management of a small number of Redditors compared to the massive amount of users. You yourself were also prominent on the list, which resulted in a massive backlash, such as r/opposinggallowboob. How did you react to seeing the list making the rounds on Reddit, and what did you think about the response from the community?

A: Yes, the Reddit community (users, moderators, and administrators included) has been growing more tumultuous in recent years. I hear from other Redditors frequently, and many have felt that their concerns about the platform and the community within it are unacknowledged by those able to foster change. Many have felt that inaction by community leaders has been detrimental to the health of the community as a whole. It was those unresolved, and wholly justified, feelings that sparked the recent outrage. Unlike the admins, moderators are VERY public-facing. I’ve been targeted in the past, but never like this. It was overwhelming. More than anything, I was sad. I saw this wave of people who felt unheard attacking the people that had been advocating for the change they wanted all along. Moderators are volunteers. We only have the tools that the platform provides. Sometimes we get new tools when we ask for them, but it’s always after a long process of advocating for them to be developed. The volume of communication involved in community moderation is immense, and experienced moderators are often sought to jump in on emerging subreddits. Many of those who were targeted for being moderators on so many subreddits are actually acting as advisors. The community was outraged at the moderators when the moderators have been telling the administrators that the community is outraged for years. That’s not to say that the administrators are to blame. The founders of Reddit didn’t know what Reddit was when they were building it. It’s become something no one could have imagined and the divide between users, moderators, and admins stems from inadequate communication.

Q: Despite myself being an active Redditor for about a decade, I’ve never really had an interest in becoming a mod. How did you first get into moderating on the platform, why, and what led you to become one on so many different subreddits?

A: Honestly, moderation online is a thankless, mentally damaging activity that I would not wish on anyone at all, especially not as a hobby. If you want to get paid as a mod on Facebook and co., do it at your own risk and do your research beforehand. There are real mental ramifications to how damaging it can be sifting through the online piles of garbage and making sure what content audiences get to see is safe and within the site’s guidelines. In other words, you are exposed to all the horrors so that everyone else isn’t. On Reddit, given the platform’s volunteer moderation format, you can imagine how this can escalate even further. Mods are singled out and attacked because they are not platform employees and in a way are not bound by any contract to behave in any specific good or bad way. There are general mod guidelines on Reddit, but it’s not as enforced as you’d think, just because of the sheer amount of activity on the platform and the impossibility of having a paid human employee counterpart from the administration vs. the thousands upon thousands of volunteer moderators. I got into it just by being on the platform 24/7, some mods I’d engage with on subs I would post to became familiar with me and vice versa. Some of them had recruitment posts needing new mods and I applied to some, got accepted in some, and ignored in a lot, so it goes. Once you start to moderate, you can use your existing mod experience to apply to new subs, etc. Honestly, most of the subs I moderated either had little to no activity or simply were joke subs made by co-mods. Granted, at one point, I was moderating one too many subs and I lately dropped about 100-plus subreddits for the sake of my own peace of mind and the fact the Reddit audience was growing tired of seeing a monopolized approach to moderation, where one mod would be active on hundreds of massive subs. I can understand their concerns to be honest, and frankly never wanted to have such a consuming online pastime. This is a screenshot of my current moderator status plus the older subs I used to moderate I now dropped:

A: This is a graph showing the number of users the top 10 mods on Reddit moderate, these mods are on more than 100-200 subreddits and counting, and moderate some 100-200 million users in total, which is extremely time-consuming and mentally damaging when you really get in the thick of it. There are a million other hobbies that we should be focused on instead, yet here we are.

Q: So after this whole debacle, you made the decision to step away from Reddit entirely, which I can only imagine must’ve been a huge deal to you. What ultimately led to this conclusion? Do you ever plan to return in a different capacity?

A: Honestly, it wasn’t as much of a huge deal as one would think. I simply had too much emotional investment and time during my days going to waste on Reddit, and with the current state of the hyperpolarized global socio-political discourse, the last thing I need is to be on anyone’s radar when I have nothing to gain from any of this. I’m just one dude trying to entertain himself online. I’m actively going to be exclusively posting about mental health awareness to my 32,000 and counting followers on Reddit. I have plans to invest, out of my own pocket, to fund some projects relating to this effort. From redirecting people to existing resources and support spaces to pretty much creating community polled donations to nonprofits and having some form of raffle events where I want to directly give back to my own audience, not with Reddit coins (Reddit’s active gift-currency) but with real-life resources that they need, that would help them feel less alone in this life. I’ve been lucky in having support from a lot of key humans in my life, and have been blessed in having really awesome humans stand by my side in thick or thin -- throughout any good or bad day on Reddit for the past five years. I want to do more good, anything else is just not worth the time or energy.

Q: Alright, I know a lot of that discussion is probably quite draining, especially given the amount of press you’ve received as of late, but I appreciate you addressing the topic. So how big are you into meme culture? Do you actively follow them, and can you share any of your recent favorites or some creations you’ve made yourself?

A: I made it onto Meme Insider, so you can say I’m pretty big into meme culture /s. I think I'm saturated for a lifetime in meme culture, I don’t actively seek them or any viral content anymore, quite the contrary, I actively try to avoid them, but they always find a way to my screens. Meme formats became the norm of online conversation today, and I definitely can relate to that, but I also have to admit that it all moves too fast to keep on top of it always. But yeah, I can talk memes any day.

Q: To conclude things here, I’d like to know what your opinion is on the future of Reddit and the internet as a whole. What do you think the future outlook looks like for the platform and other types of social media?

A: Having more or less touched base on this in my above replies, I can add that while I may not be an expert on platform creation, I have used all of them extensively for personal and professional purposes. The way I see it, the internet as a whole is in its early phase and needs a lot more improvement progress and regulations before it can become the tool it's meant to be. Right now, it’s mainly used for misinformation, pandering and conspiracy theories, as well as all the right things like a free-flowing source of information and education in real-time for all to see. Anonymity online does not bring out the best in us. Unregulated uncivil behavior online can escalate and become exponentially more dangerous than it would in the physical world. Fringe groups are always quick to fester and grow online, also expand their ranks by recruiting and preying on weaker individuals who needed a helping hand but instead got duped by the appeal of belonging to a group. The fact platforms are privately owned and our global leaders and socio-political systems are relying on them for information is also a massive red flag, not that governments can be trusted either. There is so much room for improvement, I just hope we have the time to see to it and don’t get filtered beforehand off this electromagnetic watery space rock. I think the next step should be online education in our schools and better, more transparent and fair regulations of our online laws by our governments. It’s just hard to be full of hope when I spent the past five months at home watching the chaos of COVID-19 and the illusion of safety and leadership crumble under all the global pressures relating to this pandemic. Humanity has a long way to go still, and while I want to be hopeful, I am a realist. I wish it all the best, but I doubt I'm going to see any big improvements in my lifetime. Log online for all the good reasons, for positive news, for any uplifting interactions. Don’t log online for nefarious reasons, to clash with people, to harass people, to feed your anxieties and anger. Do yourself, and everyone else, a favor and spread more good. That’s all you can do really.

---

Robert Allam currently works in the esports industry and is based in the United Kingdom. You can follow GallowBoob on Instagram and his Reddit account for more content.