2014·The social era
Unidan
Reddit's most-loved expert, undone by an argument about whether a jackdaw is a crow.
You might remember it as jackdaw comment, the excited biologist
A post
This Moment began as a post on social media, not as a video upload. Originally published on Reddit.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
Ben Eisenkop, an ecologist posting as Unidan, answered biology questions on Reddit at enormous length and with visible delight, and became the site's best-known and best-liked user. In 2014 he got into a dispute about the taxonomy of jackdaws that opened, memorably, with the words: here's the thing. Shortly afterwards he was banned for vote manipulation, having used secret alternate accounts to promote his own comments and bury other people's.
It first appeared in 2014, during the social era.
It is Reddit's own morality tale, and the site tells it to itself constantly. The jackdaw comment became copypasta almost immediately — it is quoted, parodied and reformatted years later by people who have no idea who wrote it — and the fall itself is the standard example of a platform discovering that its most beloved contributor was gaming the mechanism that made him beloved.
Eisenkop apologised and largely withdrew. The phrase "here's the thing" is now unusable on Reddit without invoking him. The episode is cited whenever a platform's reputation system is shown to be manipulable by the people it most rewards.
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Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a post on social media, not as a video upload. Originally published on Reddit.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- Ben Eisenkop, an ecologist posting as Unidan, answered biology questions on Reddit at enormous length and with visible delight, and became the site's best-known and best-liked user. In 2014 he got into a dispute about the taxonomy of jackdaws that opened, memorably, with the words: here's the thing. Shortly afterwards he was banned for vote manipulation, having used secret alternate accounts to promote his own comments and bury other people's.