Timely. A petty occurrence happens to have just taken place on the Discord server for Helldivers 2.

The game has been struggling with player capacity in the face of unexpected popularity, leading to many server issues and player inability to play the game. Due to modern shitty info siloing, Discord is the place to be for the best updates, so players flock there for news.

On Tuesday, Steam had server issues that affected things just like the normal games issues, so players poured in to the server to see what was up. When people realized it was steam and not the game, a handful (let’s say 100 to be overly generous) users started spamming F in the chat for Steam servers.

The Streisand incident: a discord mod then proceeds to ping mention everyone, all 170,000 users, to stop spamming F or get a timeout and a ban.

What netizen in their right mind sees that going any other way but exponentially increasing the F spam? Internet going to internet. Especially when they can’t play damn games.

So this lead to a total server lockdown, even for innocents just trying to play and talk about the game. All because some, presumably young and objectively inexperienced mod decided to pour gasoline on a campfire.

I know this against my will and now you do too.