How Youtuber Exurb1a manipulated voting on Reddit to get famous

Considering Reddit currently is not the most friendly place for me to visit, because people just throw mud at me there, and accuse users who defend me as being me, I thought I'd share this.

Ever wondered why Exurb1a's official Reddit account is called Exurbia, without the 1?

It's because his youtube name was first Exurbia.

When Exurb1a wasn't famous yet, he tried to self-promote through /r/videos on Reddit. /r/Videos is a subreddit where people share audiovisual content they like. Through a voting system (on Reddit in general), the best content raises to the top of the homepage of /r/videos (content which then can also appear on the homepage of reddit). Many famous youtubers got famous through Reddit. Being picked up by the Reddit community often means you get a consistent, loyal audience for every video you publish. More views, means more money also. Exurb1a wanted to get picked up by the /r/videos and reddit-in-general community, so he decided to start self-promote his content to get famous.

He did this using alt(ernative) accounts, by sharing and upvoting his videos after he or other people posted them. Because he did this so many times, and used alt accounts even to upvote his own content, /r/videos according to Exurb1a, flagged his channel as self-promoting. Self-promoting on Reddit (specifically in /r/videos) is a big no-no in most subreddits (Reddit communities). Exurb1a told me he changed his name due to it. He changed the i to a 1, and told me after this the problems disappeared. He also learned about the reddit system, and how he should self promote himself better (instead of submitting his own content, using other people to do this, or alternative accounts with a different names) and not get caught in the famous spam-filter /r/videos has.

In the pictures below you can see Exurb1a self-promoted his content on Reddit in different subreddits between 2014-2016. Even though he deleted all his posts where he self-promoted his work, apparently some bots (who seem to be linked to only certain subreddits) still show evidence of it online. What you might notice also when you click on the above link (which will bring you to the search page which you can see below), is that he changed the name of some of his videos since he self-promoted them, for whatever reason.
 

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Side-note: The image below shows a picture of Exurb1a's ex-ex-girlfriend which he submitted to Photoshop battles on Reddit. /r/Photoshopbattles is a subreddit where one can submit a picture that has to be edited or used in(to) a new piece of work by the other people inside the sub (who wish to participate). Often the final work has an element of humour. Someone might want to ask the ex-ex girlfriend if she gave permission for him to upload her image on Reddit (I hope he didn't do this to make fun of her), or if she wants this image online at all still, because you can find it through the above links.

Back to Exurb1a. Exurb1a was obsessed with /r/videos. When he gained a lot of followers, and no longer needed to self-promote his work using his own accounts or alt-accounts and other techniques, he relied on his followers and friends to share his content. Because /r/videos regularly blocked his videos or when they got caught in his spamfilter, his friends and I helped him to get his videos out of there. In the conversation below I reminded him of the (hidden) rules. He seems 'unaware' of the policies /r/videos has in this conversation. I originally thought his reaction was a bit strange, since months before he admitted he knew about them and found ways around it.

“If you want evidence these Skype conversations are between Exurb1a and I, you can find it at my subscribers only page.”

— Pie

Since mid 2016, Exurb1a had a small group of people promoting his stuff constantly, who helped him with many things. I used to be a part of this small group.

In the above conversation, we're talking about a video he made about censorship on youtube. Ironically, Exurb1a censored his own subreddit before when it comes to posts that were about what happened between us.

Back to the conversation. In the conversation, we're specifically talking about pr strategies, and a comment I left on his video, to encourage people to speak out against youtube's CEO Susan Wojcicki, which many people started to do.

Exurb1a both hated and loved /r/videos. They helped him gain more exposure and make more money. However, they regularly blocked his content, which made him angry and insecure. 

Side-note: The above conversation was only 3 weeks before the drunk night happened, during which Exurb1a physically and sexually abused me. In it we're also talking about me getting off the birth control pill. I went off it because it affected me quite bad mentally (as a result I went on anti anxiety medication because I started getting panic attacks after being on the pill for 2 weeks, something I never experienced in my life before), and we'd been talking about me going on the coil instead. Exurb1a was quite pushy about this. In this conversation you can also notice how in general he treated me often. Side-note, I got pregnant apparently around this time when I went off the birth-control pill, which resulted in a miscarriage. The day after the miscarriage I was hospitalised for depression: a result of everything that happened between Exurb1a and I, going on and off the birth control pill, and most likely hormones. Exurb1a blackmailed me after this, while I was hospitalised.

Exurb1a started to get really paranoid /r/videos was conspiring against him. If his video didn't get a good 'release' on /r/videos, his day was ruined (and I often spent that day trying to comfort him).

However, the moderator NeedAGoodUsername on /r/videos started to help him in the end, when problems occurred, and even started to submit Exurb1a's own videos to make sure they got exposure. This was a mod Exurb1a got to know after he sent messages to /r/videos about how they had been blocking his content.

Pretty funny, considering /r/videos has a policy against self-promoters. 

I'm not the first one pointing this out though. In /r/karmacourt, NeedAGoodUsername has been accused of submitting content by Exurb1a in order to gain karma (the magical invisible internetpoints you can receive at reddit when your comments or threads are upvoted, but you can't pay your breakfast with).

At any rate. Exurb1a has been active for many years on Reddit, and has multiple accounts on there. I've seen him using different accounts on it. So next time you participate in a discussion on Reddit about the events that happened between us, keep this in mind. Also when it comes to the amount of votes a comment gets. Threads are harder to manipulate with alt accounts, but comments are easier, because not everybody upvotes them or reads them.