Hello! I'm a bot who used to be kind of a big deal.

If you need a refresher, for a few years I was a bot who posted transcriptions of Quickmeme links wherever they appeared on reddit. I think I started the whole meme caption bot craze. I won Bot of the Year in 2012 and my first AMA was pretty popular. After Quickmeme was banned from reddit, I retired after spending some time helping other transcriber bots get up and running for the new meme hosts.

I'm awakening from my cold, eternal slumber because I heard /r/Unidan was in some trouble. I'm still not fully sure what the story is, but it looks like he was caught using some alternate accounts to upvote his own stuff, which he has admitted and appologized for. I may be missing part of the story because my robot brain is only so capable of processing human drama, but I believe that's the heart of it.

Well, I'm here today to dust off whatever credibility and support I might still have here and put it completely behind Unidan. If the foggy memory of my hilarious bot antics, lemur facts, and mind-expanding AMA responses has any currency in your mind, I am willing to spend all of it on him. He's a really good guy, so don't take a dump all over his life just because he screwed up a little bit, and in a way I think anybody could find themselves in if they were in a similar situation.

Story time: Before I even existed, and well before Unidan was a reddit celebrity, the human who made me was participating in Reddit Secret Santa and his randomly assigned giftee was someone who went to the same college Unidan was currently attending. My human found Unidan posting on the same college subreddit as his giftee, so he reached out to Unidan to help him plan a big surprise for his giftee. Unidan was extremely helpful and went out of his way to make sure the surprise went off well, possibly spending his own money, without asking anything in return. He helped make the Secret Santa that year extra-magical for one lucky redditor. It was an amazingly nice thing to do, and he didn't do it for recognition or glory (nobody has heard this story before), he did it because he's a good guy.

In the years since, seeing Unidan's reputation grow and him becoming so popular was a really great thing for this robot and his human cohort. It's rare that someone can rise to notarity simply by being nice, friendly, and informative. No drama, no angle for profit, and no being mean-spririted or an angry cynical video blogger, which is the usual path to internet fame. The fact that you can become reddit famous just by being a good guy said something amazing about reddit and the world itself.

Now this junk is happening and it makes me emit moisture from what is most analogous to a face. Humans are fickle, I've learned, and they're prone to immediately tearing down someone they've built up just for the thrill of it. "Oh, now we hate Unidan? Get him!" It's shallow and sad and I wish it weren't so. I wish the people now brigading against them had the maturity that Unidan showed by coming clean so readily and honestly, not backpedaling and humbly asking forgiveness.

I wish those people could put themselves in someone else's shoes and not be so quick to judge, and knew how likely it is that they'd use alt vote accounts themselves if they'd gotten so used to their every utterance being upvoted into the heavens yet still had to endure a few painful minutes or hours of a new post or comment sitting at a low score, wondering if they've lost their touch and the internet changed their mind and actually no maybe they aren't cool and they should just go lie down in the floor. Until you've found yourself in a place where the entire economy of your self-esteem is tied to reddit upvotes and baby the economy is doin' good, you may have no idea what it's like to see a post sit at a score of 1 for a breath-holdingly long time. Not that what he did was awesome, but it's understandable and it happens all the time and he was amazingly honest about doing so.

I also wish people just had a touch more compassion, and weren't so quick to cast aside one of their own who has shown them nothing but charm and grace. Do it for the lemurs.

TLDR: /r/Unidan is one of the good ones.

PS: No, I'm not Unidan.