Modern life means existing both in the "real" world and as an online version of yourself. We often criticize and cancel people over the stupid stuff they post online, but we rarely celebrate people's internet accomplishments.
Let's change that.
One Reddit user asked:
What's your greatest internet accomplishment?
Come, my fellow citizens of internet. Let us applaud one another for these mundane moments of e-greatness.
Not my Domain
paid pay day GIFGiphyI sold a domain name for $1,500 a couple of months ago. That was pretty great. It was a company I owned briefly several years ago but ultimately closed. I kept renewing the domain because it was cheap, but sold it in a heartbeat when someone offered to buy it. It's now a parked site with crappy ads.
In the UK
I had the first authenticated twitter account in the UK. Well... it was MANY years ago (obviously) and it was for a company I was running. Twitter hadn't really come to the UK but I knew folks there. I wanted to get my company the badge so asked a mate that worked there. We ended up being the first in the UK to get it. I know this because like a month a later a BIG UK company got a verified account and it was in the trade press. No one would have cared about my little business.
Creative Family
Establishing a creative writing group that lasted about 10 years. There are still active friendships between members, but the creative writing part has been dropped due to various factors.
Smut.
I wrote a story on a website and it got so popular it was translated in two different languages and my mom also found it and read it.
Very awkward because it was VERY smutty lol
Keep in mind this story is dated and written in 2012, I was 16 years old lol
If you want to check out my new project, click here. You all have sparked my creative flame!
Dog Famous
dogs jumprope GIFGiphyNASA follows my tumblr which I use to post photos of dogs I meet in the streets. I'm not even from the US. dogsinthestreet.tumblr.com.
The Tossup....
- a guy DMed me about an old comment I made on another account about parenting. Said he looked at it from time to time when he felt like he needed guidance as a new dad. It was the sweetest thing.
- one time I apparently made someone pee outside of the bowl because they were laughing at a comment. The comment was one word, and it made my day.
- got a bunch of awards and like, words of encouragement a few months ago for an angsty dumb poem I posted.
If I had to pick the one I'm proudest of, it's definitely the one on top. The second is a tossup.
I'm 38 and my badge says NASA.....
I wrote a bull white paper/how-to back in 98 or 99, while still in high school, on how to install Linux on a particular Dell laptop. (Y'all kids laugh but 40yr olds know what I'm talking about! Crap took weeks of fiddling to get work!)
Some dude who worked for a small IT consulting company found it and reached out with questions. I helped him. He offered me a help desk position at his company. I quit my job at Kmart and commuted to NYC for work that summer. College time came but I'd already established myself as the kid who can do anything IT, so they were using me on big projects like pen testing banks.
They offered me $65k plus bonuses for certifications (they were a VAR for many vendors). I told mom and dad I wasn't going to college for music (Tuba performance!)
I'm 38 and my badge says NASA and I have ~20 PhDs under me.
I'd say that stupid paper on how to install Linux on a laptop was my greatest internet accomplishment.
American Idiots
Mike Dirnt from Green Day replied to me on Instagram multiple times. Commented on a picture of my bass guitar. He was my inspiration to pick up the bass, so I'd say that was one of my greatest accomplishments on the internet. #MikeDirntHomies.
krunker.io
A few years ago I was playing some random game on the computer called krunker.io, I was playing so good that the number one clan in that game invited me
Edit: I also forgot to add that almost every time I played I would get accused of hacking because I was that good with the sniper
I don't play anymore since the new updates made it just feel weird and I don't think the clan exists anymore, it was called opal.
"I am the captain now"
I created the original Captain Phillips "I am the captain now" meme in high school ~6 years ago. It got big enough to be stolen by dory all those other damn accounts. I ended up deleting the tweet because I hated comment notifications, since it got around 20k of each interaction. That was the biggest mistake to date because now no one believes that I created it besides a few classmates I don't speak to anymore smh.
Original caption:
"When you're in a group project with unreliable people"
Hey O!
happy fun GIFGiphyBarack Obama followed me back on twitter back in 2007/2008 when he was running for President.
Popularity!
Thanks to PSN I knew so many new friends! I was also able to help one of this friends, who is paraplegic, to get better at Destiny2! In November he didn't know that much about this game, and a week ago he was able to complete 2 raids (6 players activity) with us. :)
Pip-Boy?
I made this classic Pip-Boy mod for Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3. It's a mod that replaces the default arm-mounted Pip-Boy with a handheld one that harkens back to the model used in Fallout 1 and 2.
It turned out to be pretty popular, but frankly I was surprised that no one had made it already. At the time, there was a super futuristic PDA/tablet mod (which was cool, but not lore-friendly), and no classic Pip-Boy? Strange!
Thank You, I'm Next.
Ariana Grande GIFGiphyI've had a couple celebrities like my comment/tweets. The biggest being ariana grande. I don't know why. I'm not that interesting.
Making Beats....
I've "made beats" as a hobby for 15 years or so.
A rather large producer stumbled on one of my beats and wanted to buy it from me (apparently this happens quite a bit).
So I sold him the rights to the track for what I'd consider an absurd amount of money.
Like a year and a half later my track; remade with higher quality samples was on a rather popular rappers album. You may have heard it, by no means a #1 hit but it was around. Heard it bumping in ppls cars a few times.
I legally can't tell anyone what song it is, and it doesn't really matter.
Point is it took me like an hour and a half to make a track, I posted it up somewhere then by chance this guy heard it. From there I was able to pay a full years rent up front when I got my money, to start with.
Really don't think I'll ever top that.
Actually, like right when the original X-box came out I got this pop up ad on a site "YOU WON AN X-BOX". I was stupid and I gave them my information.
I actually received an xbox like a month later. The fact that random pop up was legitimate and not a scam might be even more impressive than selling a track.
Linkin Park
1.Grey Daze followed me on Instagram for a while. It was after I posted a Linkin Park mashup in honor of Chester Bennington. He was the singer for Grey Daze until they broke up in 1999. Then he went on to join Linkin Park. Him and Grey Daze had been talking about reuniting shortly before his suicide in 2017.
2. Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park liked a vocal part I submitted when he asked for fans to sing on one of his songs. I cried on both of these days.
Evil Dead Wiki
I'm a moderator of the Evil Dead Wiki. Tons of information I've added to articles over the four or five years I've been at it has started recently appearing in officially licensed merchandise (mainly the comics and prop replicas), directly copied and pasted from the site. It's been pretty surreal for me as a fan of the franchise to see how something I started doing out of boredom one summer has started having an impact on how people treat the mythology of the series.
The Homer Theory.
homer simpson doh GIFGiphyCame up with a Simpsons fan theory about Homer being in a coma. It went viral, featured on Buzzfeed, Yahoo, TMZ, etc.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/2usu70/the_simpsons_homer_simpson_is_a_vegetable_in_a/
You can google "Simpsons fan theory" today and it'll still pop up.
Band of Friends
Not entirely via Internet, but I met a couple members from my favorite band in a bar and they invited me to their table. I asked the lead singer if he would follow me on Instagram and he did instantly and we chat every once in a while.
Edit: I am a skinny 21 y/o dude from Argentina. I met them again a couple more times among other friends and we all went to have dinner. The singer remembers me and comes to say hi when he sees me in the crowd. I think they're just that friendly.
Hey Arnold.
arnold schwarzenegger things GIFGiphyI did a cartoon about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Someone posted it here on Reddit and Arnie saw it. He liked it and complimented me on it. This is also the reason I joined Reddit in the first place. I didn't really know what it was about until that happened.
Easy A
Getting straight A's on difficult courses I would have otherwise failed if the pandemic didn't push for online education.
I was in Trig, and I'm proud because it's not even that I'm bad at math, just had a god awful professor. I'm on Calc 1 right now and it's going much smoother, now that the professor isn't total crap.
Fun AND $$$.
I paid to play a game, not sure I'm allowed to say it, on two occasions. It is totally free to play but unless you're a genius or have no job and never sleep, you pay for guns/ammo/mining tools/ships/mind implants etc. and any loot you get is worth real money on a fixed exchange rate with the US Dollar. Well I used to invest around £100 to £200 a month. I was single at the time and lived at home.
During that time I had 2 big loots, worth roughly $4k each (real money, 40k game money). I reinvested some but wanted to move out, so I sold everything bar my actual character and ended up with over £4,500 in total after conversion. A few months later and the money was in my bank and I used it as a 5% deposit on a mortgage for a flat that I now own. Fun AND monies.
Toxic Reports
This is kind of the opposite, but my friends and I used to play CS:GO religiously. They thought it would be funny to constantly report me for toxicity. To this day, the only way someone can talk to me through the game is to unmute me. Like the game has me automatically muted. Lol
The Star Dragon
game of thrones fire GIFGiphyIf we count online gaming I got the world first mage solo of a Mists of Pandaria world of Warcraft raid boss. It was the star dragon it was killable almost as soon as the next expansion launched provided you took the correct equipment (the stamina buff scroll was very important).
The Stalked.
I have a story on my profile here about how I was stalked by the same man that stalked my mother. I got some messages from podcast owners asking for my permission to read it, and I was so excited. I waited all week and kept checking Spotify for it, and when I saw they had a new episode my story wasn't in it. I was really disappointed, but happy I got an offer.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Said yes to everything a scammer asked me yesterday. I'll try my best to reenact the conversation:
Me: hello?
Scammer: hi I am calling to help you resolve your debt on a credit card.
Me: yeah I do have debt
Scammer: and what is the pin number on this credit card so I get the right one
Me: yes
Scammer: sir, the pin?
Me: yes
Scammer: I am asking you nicely to please state the pin number of the credit card that has debt
Me: yes
Aggravated Scammer: Your mom is a b***h?
Me: yes
Aggravated Scammer: hangs up
Had my friends laughing, not my proudest thing but really wanted to tell someone so enjoy. :)
A Toast to the Band.
My best friend HATES Linkin Park. One morning in college, I woke up and messaged quite a few mutual friends to please message him something about Linkin Park (image, video, comment...). And then I forgot.
Apparently he woke up to easily 100+ notifications. Everyone had sent this to other mutual friends and then other strangers chimes in as well.
This guy had so many messages of "hey I heard you love LP so I thought I'd send you this".
One friend was a photography editor and edited his face into multiple photos as the lead singer. It was talked about for so long and I brought it up as best man at his wedding last year.
RIP forever Zoila.
I posted a pic of my corgi sitting in the car with a seatbelt on tumblr and it gots hundreds of thousands of notes. spread to other sites, lol buzzfeed used it too
edit:here is the pic!
Not Alone.
Happy Cheering GIF by bluesbearGiphyI found a comic I posted in a website referenced in a girl's blog about her struggle with diabetes. It was pretty heartwarming to see that, given it is the one and only comic I've ever written (I'm an economist).
Synonyms....
A friend's last name is Klotz. Me and another friend started a campaign in the late 90s to turn his last name into a synonym for loser. We used it whenever we could. The friend helping to spread this was a corporate trainer so he used it in front of people from all over the country. At some point I check urban dictionary and it was on there.
Club Penguin
I attained 2000+ subscribers on my Club Penguin focused YouTube channel as a kid, back in 2009, when 2000 subscribers was a pretty high amount.
The Best Block!
donald trump GIFGiphyI got blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter for calling him a "mad b**tard!"
The Jolly Parade.
I once played WoW during Christmas and started a Christmas parade that circled old Orgrimmar. At its peak, I was able to follow the back of the parade and most people were on reindeer mounts following each other at rp walking pace.
Technically my most famous internet thing is actually a hearthstone highlight on the hearthstone subreddit, but the Christmas parade always makes me laugh when I think about the hour or 2 i spent on christmas starting a thing I hadn't yet seen.
Way, way, wayyyy back when....
amish GIFGiphyWay, way, wayyyy back when the World Wide Web first came into existence, I was the author and owner of the world's first Amish Web Page.
It was a joke page, obviously, playing on the fact that the Amish would likely not be online or using a computer (at least not then).
It was sparse. It had a section on "tending thy livestock", and one on "raising thy barn", and another on "fixing thy computer", and finally a section titled "tourists and how to hide their bodies".
It disappeared sometime in the 1990s. I can't find it on Wayback. It's truly lost to the ages. But it was very definitely the very first of its kind on the WWW.
Flood Escape.
Alright. So. During Hurricane Harvey I posted a snapchat to the "our story" so that everyone could see it. It was hundreds of cockroaches escaping from the floodwaters in Houston. I deleted it from my own story bc I was like eh this is dumb and I hated the sound of my voice in the video. Well it stayed on the "our story" and got 1.2M views. My biggest internet accomplishment and I didn't even save the video as proof! And my 10 seconds of fame was due to... roaches.
Edit: Oh! Just remembered. A few years ago Aaron Carter followed me back on Twitter. Childhood crush. Not adulthood crush though.
"internet police"
I played Minecraft when I was younger and joined a server where I met someone I've now known online for around 8-9 years. We managed to trick some kid we were the "internet police" and had reason to believe he was hacking. We ended up getting his dad on the microphone and trying to explain that we believed his son was cheating. He replied "I'm sergeant something something with the New Jersey police department" and we immediately left the call scared AF, looking back, smart guy.
Tracing Figures.
animation drawing GIF by CheezburgerGiphyI draw actors, for fun, and if they come to a local convention, I'll get some of those drawings signed. Those drawings get framed and hung up on my wall. I also try tagging them on IG so they can see. While my favorite actor doesn't have IG, his wife does, and one day, she actually favorited both drawings. I didn't know it was her at first. So, even though I'll probably never meet him in reality, he at least saw my work.
Before El Camino
Before the release of El camino, Jesse Pinkman - Aaron Paul did a Video (4:16) for vanity where he breaks down fan theories of breaking bad... And one my fan theory got featured in it... I am happy about that.
I remember watching that video! I totally believe your theory, because if it's true that means Jesse didn't suffer so much.
Kylie for the Win!
kylie minogue gif bubbles pop GIFGiphyIt was 2013, a mobile phone company called ZTE, hosted an online quiz to win a "Blade III" smart phone.
The question was something to do with Kylie Minogue.
Being the extremely gay 17 year old I was; I answered first, and correctly.
I won the smartphone, the only catch was, that I had to use it on Virgin Mobile. I'm so proud of myself, even to this day!
A Threat With Merit
Someone threatened a school shooting on WoW forums about 12 or 13 years ago, and I saw it right when it was posted. I managed to figure out where the guy was an alerted the proper authorities. All I did was talk to the guy and tried to relate to him. He flat out told me what town he was in and I just made a few phone calls.
I couldn't get any traction so I sent a message to a local newspaper, on the advice of someone else. The reporter reached out to me and then he ran with it, in terms of law enforcement. I don't know exactly what happened after that but I had an email thanking me for the heads up from the PD. The threat had merit and the guy got busted.
Overthrowing Clan Leaders
GiphyI joined a minecraft server back in ~2012 which had a clan system but there was only 1 clan and it had about 40 people in it because every other clan was immediately squashed by them.
Myself, my cousin, and one friend completely overthrew them and cemented ourselves as leaders of the server for probably the next year after that.
I came back like 2 years later and people would be like "holy sh*t, you're THE TrickDaddyRed? I've heard stories about your clan!"
The Thread Lives On
I started a joke thread on the official forum of a video game back in 2008. It was just something whimsical and satirical that I didn't think too much about at the time, but it absolutely exploded. Not only did it get about 50 pages of responses, but once it died it would get re-bumped every few months (at the end of every 'season' of the game).
I quit the game about 6 months later, but some years later I came across the link to the thread and I clicked on it. It turned out the post lived on and carried on getting bumped and generating a ton of responses all the way until the game eventually died in 2014. Which you would think would be the end of it. But I found out some years later that the game ended up having a sequel, and some of the players from the original game recreated the original thread on the new game's forum and it was still generating traffic. There are probably people commenting on it who weren't even born when the thread was originally posted.
Wikipedia Senator
I changed my school district's Wikipedia page. I created a section titled "Notable Alumni". I was a U.S. Senator for six months before they caught on. I even made a campaign website as a corroborating source.
Domain Names
I had a friend who was offered $1,000 for a domain. He called his attorney and his attorney said, "hold out for more."
He held out until $50,000. They paid $50,000... He used that $50,000 to start a business now worth millions.
My friend's sister misspelled her domain name when she registered it. Ended up being a sexual innuendo. Sold it to a adult film company for $15,000 and used that to help with start-up cash for a storefront.
Matchmaker
I made a bootleg comic book site back in the 90's. I used geocities and used each registration to host one comic book, then used another one to link them all together. I scanned all the comics from my collection. I even had an html template with the page numbers embedded so I would upload the same site with images. That's not the accomplishment part.
I had a phpBB forum for conversation and requests with a few thousand members... 2 members met there and got married from it. I think they lived in different countries too. That was cool, the rest was a waste of time I guess.
Exceeding His Karma
GiphyMy husband has been on Reddit for years, he finally convinced me to get it, and I bet him within the first 2 weeks I would exceed his 1200 karma.. on the 13th day I made a comment that got over 27k upvotes that put me at 10k karma :)
He was in utter disbelief sitting beside me watching the comment grow and reach top comments haha.
OG Minecrafter
I found Minecraft VERY early in development thanks to a browser addon called StumbleUpon! that put a "random" website button on your bar. I've been playing almost since the game went public in dev stage thanks to it. I'm not sure if that qualifies as an accomplishment or not.
You could fly by default and maps were just these tiny squares. Everything was one punch, there were no water physics to speak of, and I think there were 8 blocks XD
- Emu_pie
Humanist Scum
I got David Barton (crazy Christian nationalist that at least used to screw up Texas school books) to publish an article about how I was what was wrong with the youth in America.
I went to a fundamentalist college and was a Christian at the time when everyone at my school was excited by his website, I think it was called Wallbuilders. He wrote this article insulting people who didn't think the US was founded intentionally to only ever be for Christians.
I responded with a seven page sourced paper on how most of us now wouldn't consider the founding fathers "real" Christians and that while some likely wanted a Christian nation others were vocally against it so making the argument on intention would necessitate cherry picking who you cite. I also referenced how his extra sources he cites are dubious as he won't let anyone verify their authenticity.
My core argument was just that we don't know what they overall wanted and since they didn't explicitly make the US a theocracy it seems weird to take 2-3 founding fathers and apply their beliefs to all of them.
For this he made a post talking about how 19 year old user threedm was literally what's wrong with the youth in America and also was an idiot and also secular humanist scum.