So whether this is downvoted into oblivion or not, I'd like to get my general message out there if possible. (Just as a note, this is a self-post so I don't get karma for it).

To all of those people who are going through my history and insta-downvoting, I implore you to atleast allow this one to survive your onslaught as it displays and examples some of your handi-work, perhaps you feel some form of pride for this being exposed to Reddit?

Anyway, let's start off with a general "what the hell are you talking about", for the people that don't know what happened.

tl;dr: I found something on imgur via a friend outside of Reddit. I posted it to /r/gaming after changing the URL to a gallery because the initial URL wasn't working with RES properly and it instantly became a highly upvoted thread. Shortly after this, the original creator /u/utterpedant posted in the topic saying that this was his content and had only posted it in /r/wtf 2 hours ago. People got mad. People started the downvote brigade. Then the serious stuff happened.

For more information, further reading can be found here, here and here.

Now, after the explanations, I'd like to start with what this meant for both /u/utterpedant and myself.

/u/utterpedant received great sympathy for my travesty of a repost and earned himself over a year's worth of Reddit Gold and plenty of comment karma. I on the other hand, am tagged and dogged with downvotes no matter where I post now.

But who cares about internet points? The problem actually revolved around the more personal aspect of things. During the onslaught of my comment history, people started digging through my personal information and started to retrieve things such as my OKCupid and POF profile, posting personal pictures to various threads, and even some went as far as doxxing me to retrieve my Facebook information. I am not sure if this is the end of the doxxing, but I sincerely hope nothing further generates from this. I became one of the most witch-hunted person on Reddit, to the point where people were threatening me in PMs, both with insults and with releasing personal information to the masses.

Then there was a personal aspect of messages sent through Reddit. There were too many to list, so here is just a few typical examples:

Insults

etc, you get the picture, I won't spam these (there's over 500 atleast). These were fairly tame and I was able to ignore the vast majority of them. However some were really offensive, I'm surprised people got this worked up about it:

More Serious Insults (Third is a link to my Facebook)

But that's not to say everyone was completely horrible, it restored my faith in Reddit a little. Some of these were genuine from the start and others were initially bandwagoning but turned around after I spoke to them a bit:

Some Faith Restored

All in all, I'm not asking for forgiveness, regardless of the excuses or circumstances. I posted something that wasn't mine, and whilst my intentions weren't malicious, I can see why the original creator would be upset. I can only offer my condolences. However, I think that going this far as to completely destroy someone's browsing activity (I will probably have to create another account), then taking it to extremes and digging up my personal information. That's too far.

Anyways, I'll be around for quite a while so if anyone has any queries, I'll be happy to answer them. If I'm still being mass-downvoted I may resort to PMing them as a response though.

Thanks for sitting through this lengthy post.