There are places on the World Wide Web where you definitely should not go. This is one of them.
Wikipedia describes Banhammer as “a satirical term for the power wielded by an administrator to ban or block users of internet forums, wikis, online games, or other internet media."
The internet's beloved (hated) Urban Dictionary tells us that Banhammer is “a symbol of violence and imaginary power over others, used by peniley-challenged jerks, at websites, to make themselves feel better about being so inadequate, and unliked by anybody."
In reality you don’t know what the Banhammer feels like until you meet it. It smacks hard and has an ugly smirk on its face. Users of Reddit, Voat, 4chan, and other sites for people without a lives will know what I am talking about.
But what if I were to tell you that there exists a community whose sole purpose is to Banhammer people? What if I were to tell you that users go online to get Banhammer and enjoy it? Well, we are browsing the net, so we know that anything can happen.
Add to that—what is a “Soapbox” or “Soap Box?" It’s a box you stand on when you give a speech. How does it combine with Banhammer? Easy.
Voat.co/v/soapboxbanhammer is a community built on bans, for bans, by bans and does that very thing – bans. The description of the community reads:
“Post anything on your mind, we DGAF. Bans are earned, or aren't. We don't care. But you will eventually be banned for an indiscriminate amount of time. These times can be from a few minutes, or permahammer in special cases.
I’ve been there for a while now and have over twenty submissions. The longest time I’ve been banned for? 24 hours. That’s not even close to what some people get.
Rumor has it – longest ban that happens here has been for 120 days!
But why would you want to get banned? What is the joy? Simple. You make a post. It can be obscene – most of them are. Or not. Of the top ten posts on /v/soapboxbanhammer, three are in no way offensive, the others are, and six of them use obscene language. We are on the Internet, remember? So, you make a post. And you get banned. You feel a reaction to what you said! You feel that you threw a rock at a big giant and he threw it back! You feel important! It’s something like getting arrested for doing graffiti - when the system breaks you, it means that you were worth breaking!
Also, the randomness adds to the fun. You might never get “caught"-- or you can get banned after your first post. This community is a great place to throw anything you have at a giant fan and see it fly around.
This is just one of the examples of why the Internet is a great place. The internet has place for everything, and if you can have a website dedicated to cat pics, why not have a page dedicated to over-abusing admin powers? And so, there it is, with over 600 users and growing. Long live the net.
I must say that /v/soapboxbanhammer is not the only place like this. There is also the newly created /r/soapboxbanhammer on Reddit (although it was created by mods from /v/ - who, as the story goes, banned themselves as a joke and then found out that they could not un-ban themselves and thus had to move to Reddit).
Also important – beware, in the real world there is a strong person wielding a Banhammar. Luckily for us, he spends most of his time protecting this world as one of the members of Th Avengers. Yay.
