Ask Lemmy

Is it common for people to get death threats?

Or at least get enough that you can start ranking them by category?

Maybe I'm just lucky.

I had closed the gate to my checkout, turned out the light, wiped everything down, took my till out and had walked away a bit when I saw a customer start loading his groceries on the now-abandoned belt.

i walked back to try to help by simply saying, "Sorry man, that checkout is closed, you'll have to go a few up to get through."

I went upstairs, counted my till and posted my results, got my stuff and went to leave.

Suddenly my bosses are on me checking if I'm okay, and I'm being escorted off-site by security for my safety.

Apparently the man was not appreciative, went to the managers and told them he was going to wait for me outside so he could run me over..

I've never had any death threats sent to me lol. From the title of your post, it sounds like you get them regularly??

I was openly an atheist in highschool (early 2000s). Death threats weren't sent, they were spoken to my face

I was working for an ISP and sent one of our customers a warning about harassing people via email. He switched to me instead. It escalated up the chain to my manager's manager, who called the customer's dad because he was 14. Dad got him under control, because the alternative was to lose his phone service for 12 months.

A year later, the kid contacted me again to say I should give him a job, because I'm an incompetent fuck and users shouldn't have to put up with me. Would you be surprised to learn we didn't hire him?

Every few years I stalk his blog to see what he's been up to. There's usually a couple more arrests to add to the tally, but like always they weren't his fault, because someone provoked him!

I made a PR/commit to to a foss android kernel for 'tap to wake' ported from fork to another model. I fully attributed where and who and complied with the GPL. The guy lost his shit and threatened my very existence, over around 20 lines of code.

Facebook: Got comments from by wife's brother and his friends about God's blessing and such being responsible for her pregnancy.

"It's 2013. We have a pretty solid handle on how a woman gets pregnant, and there's no god in the explanation."

Of my fuck they exploded. "I'll fucking kill you!" "Best not come back to this town!" So it goes.

I've been on the internet since the 90's, and a lot of that has included online gaming, so I just assume that I've received a few. But none that I remember.

Posting vaguely feminist quotes on social media way back in the 2010s ¯\(ツ)/¯

Terminally online gamergate era proto-chuds got big mad over cheesy screencaps ig lmao

I think the one time I kept taunting that one guy about fucking his Mom in the butt. He threatened to kill me when I live-streamed it. Fucking ridiculous.

I’ve had people annoyed with me, especially once when I did a drastic, much-needed, and long-overdue overhaul of a UI in software with millions of users (people hate even minor change in software they use every day, so there’s no way to not piss some of them off when you change things like that), but I’ve never, in all my time online since 1996, received death threats. And I used to make a hobby of arguing with actual Nazis on reddit.

What are you saying to people?

I was hired for a job some guy had been fired from several years earlier. There had been at least one other person in the position after him and before me. But for some reason he found out about me, decided I was a problem, and I had to get escorted to and from my car in the employee parking and the building each day for a couple of weeks until he lost interest.

And more pedestrian yet depressing, the stereotypical: I politely declined unwanted advances from a strange man in a bar, strange man promptly lost all emotional control and proved I made the right decision.

Personal death threats: I was a mod on a Facebook group that banned a guy for being hostile to others, and this guy turned out to be paranoid and probably had some other mental health issues going on and believed there was a vast conspiracy against him with us working with people we had never heard of and with other online forums that he had been hostile on

Impersonal death threats: just the typical stuff from rightwingers for being harmlessly different in some way

Not sent but spoken on the phone.

I worked for the tax services on the phone and received a call from a woman who needed to pay back some money, more than she could afford. Before she spoke to me she had been given advice by someone from the tax office she had met in person and they had told her she wouldn't need to pay back anything. This was wrong, but we were not allowed to say that someone from the tax office made a mistake, even if it was obviously so.

She blamed me, personally, for making her pay back the money and then threatened to kill me. So I guess a death threat for fixing someone else's fuck up is the stupidest reason yet.

Not a literal death threat, but close.

I once told someone screaming at the bus driver to be reasonable. It was a replacement bus service during winter because the aboveground metros couldn’t drive anymore. The buses were loaded with people, and someone apparently felt ill and had to get out of the bus, so people were screaming at the bus driver to stop. We were driving on the highway, though - you can’t just get out there, even if it wasn’t dangerous anyway.

If I remember correctly the bus driver stopped when it was possible and the ill person got off. When I got out at my stop, the person screaming the loudest got off as well, turned to face me and said: ‘I hope you get cancer.’

I once had a conversation about economics with a different person. Just something clicked in some other guy and sent them down a spiral.

Telegram: Someone threatened to kill me and my family if I don't transfer them my username. Some people are so sick.

Not so much a death threat but more of an indirect "kill yourself" through Reddit's care package system.

There was a comic strip/meme someone posted that was a reference to Romeo & Juliet and some people in the comments didn't understand it, so I gave my attempt at explaining the connection. Not only did I get my first taste at how heated Shakespeare nerds get about things not being exactly the same to count as references, but someone straight up just sent me a care package in good ol' Reddit tradition of love and peace.

Genuinely concerning how people get so angry at such a minuscule thing.

Owned him in call off duty.

For having a cartoon dog as my avatar. On Reddit, tho. No death threats from Lemmy. Yet.

Definitely this one: https://lemmy.world/comment/19647019

Because I don’t like Mary Jane and said One More Day opened up better story telling possibilities for Spider-Man and I think JMS is a hack.

Being a Christian

I used to work for Facebook, and in their UI, it keeps you from taking a username less than 5 letters, but there was nothing in the database to stop it. So, I removed the check, brought up an instance on my dev server, and took the username “h”. I got a lot of threats for that.

I’m no longer on Facebook.

Existing.