Brace yourselves. There's a TL;DR at the bottom.

It's stupid and disrespectful when people fake online for attention.

I was on Reddit last night, and saw a post on a very popular sub (like a group/community) that said that the poster had terminal cancer. I read the post, and it seemed very real at the time. I went about my business, until this morning I saw some drama happening on a different sub about how the post had been faked. This is bad enough, but the function of Reddit (explained below) made the situation a lot worse.

On Reddit, you can award posts little medals. (silver, gold or platinum, in increasing order of good-ness?) You either buy Reddit coins for real money or use the coins earned from your own posts/comments being awarded, and you purchase the medals with these. Silver don't really do anything except tell the person who created the post/comment that you thought it was cool. This costs 100 coins to award, the equivilant to about 38 pence in my country's currency. Gold gives the person a week of Reddit Premium (no ads and a badge) and 100 coins to spend (1 Reddit silver). It costs 500 coins to award this, £1.89 in my country. Platinum gives the user a month of Reddit Premium. For every month you have Reddit Premium, you get 700 coins, the equivilant of £2.65, and you spend this on giving other awards. Platinum costs 1,800 coins, or about £5.49. That's a lot of money to spend for a stranger on the Internet.

Still with me? Good.

When you comment on posts and get likes (upvotes) for it, you gain points called karma. They're more for bragging rights, but on certain communities (especially on popular ones) you need a certain amount to make a post there. You also gain karma if your post gets upvoted.

I'm sure you're bored already, but I had to tell you this info so you can understand how bad the situation is.

So, the post was taken down because it was faked. It's not uncommon for people to post fake things to gain karma and coins. But this person left the post up for several hours, answered people's questions about having terminal cancer, and accepted condolences from concerned strangers. Worse yet, the poster was awarded 78 platinum awards, and countless silver and gold. 78 platinum awards. That's £428.22. Not counting the cost of the silver and gold as well. Over £400. Spent on a liar.

78 platinum awards is equal to 140,400 coins spent. Remember each platinum gets you a month of Premium? 78 months. 6 years and 6 months of Premium. Also, each month of premium gets you 700 coins. £207.48 gained over 6 and a half years.

Total eqivilant amount of money gained from platinum alone = £428.22 from platinum themselves + £207.48 from the Premium bonuses =  £637.70 worth of coins gained from platinum. I can't emphasise enough that the poster also got lots of silver and gold.

Skipping the maths, the post also got 48 silvers (£18.24) and 28 golds (£52.92). But wait - remember that each gold gets you a week of Premium? We're still not done with the maths.

28 golds, 28 weeks of Premium. Assuming each month is a tidy 4 weeks, that's 7 months. 700 coins each month? 4900 coins. AKA £18.55.

The poster also gains coins from the gold awards (not premium). Skip, skip, you're probably bored, so am I, that's £10.64 in gained coins.

Cost of the lies:

£637.70 for platinums + Premium bonuses

+ £18.24 for silvers

+ £52.92 for golds

+£18.55 for Premium gold bonuses

+£10.64 worth of coins gained from golds

=

A total of...

£738.05 spent on the user

That's the equivalent amount of money that has been spent/gained. I know this seems weird, but if you converted all the coins spent/given/gained, this is the equivalent amount.

158,000 coins spent on the awards, 54,600 coins gained from platinum premium, 4900 coins gold premium. That's 217,500 coins spent on/awarded to this user. The user would have also gained lots of karma for this, but they're losing it now because they are being downvoted.

That's not even the end of it. The person made an apology post, which for some stupid reason people also awarded. 3 silver, 2 gold, 3 platinum. We've done all this before. £1.14 on silver, £1.90 on 2 gold (no premium bonuses as it's not a full month), plus 76p in extra coins, and £16.47 on platinum. 3 months of platinum, £7.95 in coins.

I promise this is the end. Final calculation:

£738.05 + £1.14 + £1.90 + £16.47 + £0.76 + £7.95 = £766.27

TL;DR Reddit user posts lie about having terminal cancer, and gets a lot of money worth of Internet coins.

Final stats - £766.27 spent on/awarded to user

226,500 coins spent on/awarded to user

7 years, 1 month and 2 weeks of Reddit Premium.

I can't believe I spent two hours on that. The actual ranting bit will be in the next chapter.