March 6-8, 2011. A pseudonymous poster claims to be a terminally ill Oregon cancer patient exercising his right to die under their compassionate Death with Dignity Act. In his last 51 hours, he creates an "aloha account" (hello and goodbye, he explains) named lucidending on Reddit and posts an "I am a..." thread. Here's a [summary]. Surprisingly, er, lucid in his remaining hours, he provides a perspective on death as well as the power of the Internet (and the Reddit community) to bind humanity together in strange circumstances. Meanwhile, the Reddit community comes together to celebrate his life and his death.
Some of the Internet contributions of his fellow Redditors include
Scepticism. Since the identity of lucidending was unverifiable there were a number of sceptics. One [thread] suggested that this might be someone building a bank of karma for a huge trolling spree; but in the same thread others argued it didn't matter if it was true since the event had been so inspiring. Oregonlive.com argued that lucidending's proposed method of suicide, [intravenous medication, was illegal in Oregon]. Some people getting sick of all the responses and tributes to lucidending, started accusing people of being KarmaWhores. In this subthread, Wonzo wrote, ["How long are you fuckin guys gonna milk this?"] to which ent4rent replied, "agreed. I come to reddit for actual news, not people karma whoring off someones unfortunate situation".
A hoax claim. On March 8, Adrian Chen of Gawker Media and The Onion News Network tweets:
Apparently this stunt was in reaction to the [episode] where Redditor's formed a LynchMob, believing a woman raising money for cancer was a fraud. Note that Adrian Chen wrote that article on Gawker. It's also relevant that Adrian Chen's senior thesis at Reed College (2008) was entitled, "Death Talk: Media Discourse and the Right to Die Movement, 1990-1995"
For contrast and in parallel, a separate Redditor posts [a thread that he will commit suicide] because he has been battling major depression for years.
See also
![[Whiteboard caligraphy of quote about the meaning of life]](/index.cgi/contrast/http://i.imgur.com/QNx6X.jpg){kind=link}