Wesley Ford (Also known as Wesley_Ford, or u/Wesley_Ford)

Submission 8,476

About

Wesley Ford is an internet troll that was born on May 17th, 2019, when he created his user profile, u/Wesley_Ford, on Reddit.^[1] He comments on a wide variety of subreddits, but most frequently on r/dankmemes.^[2] He appears to be attempting to farm as much karma as possible, as well as awards such as golds and platinums. Statistics for his profile are notoriously unreliable, as he often posts comments that would be better suited in a bodybuilding.com flame war, only to delete them several hours later to avoid losing karma. An example of this is here in a thread from r/Atheism, where he made a comment, edited to ask if downvotes would "hurt his karma," then deleted his comment.^[3] This image shows the edit, and I've linked to a removeddit thread that shows his original comment (and that the comment has since been deleted, although according to the current thread on reddit, it was removed by moderator, not by the original user).

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After Wesley Ford made his account, several people around the site took notice of him. Just a week after the creation of his account, Reddit user u/SolitaryToad made a post on r/OutOfTheLoop, asking if there was some kind of meme that he missed out on with Wesley Ford.^[4] Although the post went mostly unnoticed, user u/WarrenPuff_It said that Wesley was a redditor trying to beg for platinum, and that he had posted and subsequently deleted a thread on r/AskReddit, asking redditors of the best methods to trick people into giving his posts and comments awards. His antics quickly became notorious to many frequent users of the site, especially to those of the infamous "browse by new" culture. A day after the creation of his profile, he created a pinned post sent to followers of his account that claimed that his profile was private, and that users would have to give him platinum if they wanted to gain access to the rest of his posts and comments. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I was able to get a lot of the original text of this post here.

You can still see the edited version of his post on his profile, as it is still pinned and has not been deleted. On May 22nd, 2019, a profile with the username of u/I-Hate-Wesley-Ford was created.^[5] Although he did occasionally respond to many of Wesley_Ford's comments, he has become much less active in recent months, using the profile more as a normal reddit profile than to be a counter-troll to Wesley_Ford. On May 29th, 2019, r/Wesley_FordIsStupid was created, supposedly by user u/RX7Reaper, as he is, to this day, the only moderator of the subreddit.^[6] As you can probably guess, this sub is dedicated to posting images of comments made by Wesley_Ford, especially those that garnered him many downvotes. On June 14th, 2019, u/I-Hate-Wesley-Ford created r/IHateWesleyFord, another subreddit specifically dedicated to hating on Wesley_Ford.^[7] Several other subreddits and users surrounding the antics of Wesley_Ford, both positive and negative, popped up in the months since; they include: u/Azores76, r/churchofwesley, r/Ford2020, r/Wesley_Ford, r/gudonyawesley, and u/ProphetOfWesley.^[8]^[9]^[10]^[11]^[12]^[13] The last interesting subreddit dedicated to Wesley_Ford is r/shutupwesley.^[14] This one is an interesting case indeed. The subreddit was created on January 14th, 2013, a full six and a half years before the creation of u/Wesley_Ford. Neither archive.is nor the Wayback Machine have any snapshots of the subreddit, before or after the creation of this account. In the present day, it is yet another Wesley hate sub, but I don't know what the purpose of the sub was before Wesley popped up. I have messaged the moderators with an information request, and will be looking deeper into this issue, but at this time I have no reason to believe that there is any sort of conspiracy going on.

The only reference to Wesley_Ford I could find on any non-reddit site was on Hypixel.net, which is a forum born out of a YouTube channel, and is now a moderately sized server hosting service for Minecraft. On June 29th, 2019, a user account of the name @Wesley_Ford was created, and he created an introduction post as is customary on these forums.^[15] This account had the same profile picture, and showed the same egotistical (yes, Wesley, if you're reading this, egotistical is also a word) style of writing as the reddit account of the same name. From what I can tell, the account on the Hypixel forums quickly gained a similar level of notoriety, as his profile page quickly filled with comments – again, both positive and negative.^[16] Honestly I haven't quite figured out yet what the point of this is. He did also create a Facebook page^[17], but has no history of posting or commenting there, and also no friends.