Few websites have struggled with online trolls more than Reddit, a freewheeling Internet location for discussion groups that often turn ugly.

Last summer, Reddit banned five discussion groups, including the one that was most popular – with more than 150,000 subscribers – which specialized in finding photos of overweight people looking happy, almost all women, and adding mean captions. Members of the group “fatepeoplehate” would then post these images all over the targets’ Facebook pages and in various locations on the Internet.

This is but one example brought to us in the current Time magazine cover story, an extensive piece about trolls who go beyond flippant commentary to launch cyberattacks on individuals. The unnerving story is headlined, “Why We’re Losing the Internet to a Culture of Hate.”

“What you see on Reddit that is visible is at least 10 times worse behind the scenes,” Dan McComas, a former Reddit employee, told Time. “Imagine two users posting about incest and taking that conversation to their private messages, and that’s where the really terrible things happen. That’s where we saw child porn and abuse and had to do all of our work with law enforcement.”

Police protection sought

Time reports that when a Reddit company executive, Jessica Moreno, McComas’ wife, pushed for getting rid of “fatpeoplehate,” the readers struck back. She and her husband had their home address posted online along with suggestions on how to attack them, prompting the couple to seek police protection. They’ve since moved and taken special precautions to eliminate their presence online.

Moreno issues a warning to Time readers about trolls. She cites a Reddit group that mailed “secret Santa” gifts to each other. Sounds nice, but some members objected because the person assigned to them had made nasty racist or sexist comments on the site. Because of the personal information collected by Moreno to arrange the pairings, she came across a disturbing discovery about trolls.

“The idea of the basement dweller drinking Mountain Dew and eating Doritos isn’t accurate,” she told Time. “They would be a doctor, a lawyer, an inspirational speaker, a kindergarten teacher. They’d send lovely gifts and be a normal person. … It’s more complex than just being good or bad.”

Joel Stein, author of the Time piece, writes about disgusting examples of trolls acting like online terrorists:  a young female blogger who offered tips on how to cover pimples with makeup, and was told by trolls to kill herself because of her “disgusting acne;” a soccer referee who had rape threats aimed at his daughter, accompanied by photos of the young girl going home from school; and an online writer who wrote about the death of her father, prompting one of her creepiest critics to create a fake Twitter account featuring a photo of her dad and a bio that said, “embarrassed father of an idiot.”

Time reports that the female blogger, Em Ford, now 27, used her online experiences – blocking hundreds of men each week – to create a documentary on trolls. “It’s not about the target. If they get blocked, they say, ‘That’s cool,’ and move on to the next person,” she says. “Trolls don’t hate people as much as they love the game of hating people.”

The writer later received an apology from the troll who disrespected her deceased father. He said he wasn’t happy with his life and was angry at her for being so pleased with hers.

A strange sort of envy

Joel Stein, author of the Time piece, writes that he had an encounter with his most persistent troll. Megan Koester has been attacking Stein on Twitter for more than two years. When she tweeted him with a threat (“Meet me outside Clifton’s in 15 minutes. I wanna kick your ass.”) and followed that up a month later with a similar threat, Stein decided to take action.

joelstein

Stein

He sent a tweet to Koester asking if he could buy her lunch, “figuring she’d say no or, far worse, say yes and bring a switchblade or brass knuckles …”

She accepted and what he found was a petite, 32-year-old woman, a freelance writer and stand-up comic, who could be warm and funny, though she seemed alarmed to discover that he was a “people person.”

Koester explained that the reason why she hounded Stein online was due to her disgust with his career success and his bragging about good fortune in some of his columns and tweets.

“You just extruded smarminess that I found off-putting. It’s clear I’m just projecting. The things I hate about you are the things I hate about myself,” she told him.

Part of her motivation was her own mistreatment on social media, including a Twitter follower who tweeted that he was going to rape her and hoped she would die afterward.

“So you’d think I’d have some sympathy,” she said about trolling Stein. “But I never felt bad. I found that column so vile that I thought you didn’t deserve sympathy.”