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The internet is applauding a woman’s revenge on one of her neighbors over parking spot drama in the complex where she lives.

The Reddit post, which has garnered 12,600 upvotes, is titled, “Male Karen yells at me for being in ‘his spot.’ Fine, it’s my spot now.” Redditor @xiinya shared the post to the subreddit “Petty Revenge” where it has received over 300 comments since it was shared on June 22.

Revenge, which is an action carried out by harming another for a wrong, is a common emotion that is oftentimes thought to provide catharsis when in actuality, researchers have uncovered it ends up prolonging the feelings associated with the wrong, according to the website Science of People.

The nonprofit organization Knowable Magazine spoke with psychologist Michele Gelfand, who says revenge involves negative and positive feelings. “The classic idiom ‘revenge is sweet’ does have some empirical support—neuroscience research shows that reward centers in the brain are activated when people are just thinking about taking revenge, and people forecast that they are going to be happy after seeking revenge,” Gelfand explained. “But other research shows that this is short-lived and that people are often not as happy as they thought they would be. In that sense, revenge can be thought of as bittersweet, involving positive and negative feelings.”

The Post

The original poster (OP) works from home full-time, and doesn’t drive unless it’s for grocery shopping or when she’s “out for an appointment.” In her complex, there are “non-reserved” and “reserved” spots that are located in the underground garage. However, none of them are assigned.

“As long as you have a ‘reserved’ sticker on your vehicle, any of the ‘reserved’ spots (which are all labeled ‘reserved’) are fair game,” the woman explained.

She has a non-reserved sticker since it’s $40 cheaper, and was coming from an appointment when the situation went down. She turned into her neighbor’s “reserved” spot so she could back her car into an “open, non-reserved spot” behind her.

“Lo and behold, male Karen in his rusty 2007 Rav4, starts honking at me for being in ‘his spot,’ telling me that ‘I can’t park there’ because I don’t have a ‘reserved’ sticker,” she recounted. “I told him I was only backing out.”

She admitted she probably should have just let the situation go, “but his Karen-ness p**sed me off so much.” As the OP was getting onto the elevator, she realized the man only wanted to park in that spot as it was “right next to the elevator.”

The woman revealed a “lightbulb went off” in her head, and she made her way to the rental office and asked to upgrade her parking pass. It’s additional money she has to pay, but she said it’s “worth the petty revenge.”

The Redditor added that she was going to wait for the man to leave for work the following day so she could move her car into “‘his spot’ and leave it there for God knows how long.” She added that there are perks to working “fully remote.”

She concluded: “Male Karen yells at me for being in ‘his spot,’ I upgrade my parking pass and leave my car in ‘his spot.'”

When a Redditor asked the OP to update everyone when the man discovers the situation, she said, “I doubt there will be much of an update, given that there’s more than one reserved spot, but the day I hear from the (property) manager is the day I know I got his a**.”

Redditors React

Many comments poured in over the viral post, with many people seeming to appreciate the woman’s efforts. “This is the pettiness I look for,” a Redditor admitted. Another user added, “Pettiness: satisfied. See you tomorrow!”

Talk of approval was everywhere, and one user called the OP their “hero,” adding, “This is the kind of petty that I cuddle with and nurture and love on.”

Another Redditor reasoned the situation is their kind of petty as well. “Spending $40 to screw a dude out of ten extra steps every day… I f**king love it,” they expressed.

One user thinks the woman spent the right amount of money on the revenge. “Petty AF [as f**k] OP, well played,” they said. “$40 is the perfect amount to spend on this. Much more and you’d be a lunatic, much less and it’s too trivial to be of concern.”

Others suggested that the OP invest in a camera. “You might want to angle a webcam on your vehicle in case this idiot tries to mess with your car,” a Redditor said.

Newsweek reached out to @xiinya for comment.

Other Viral Moments

This isn’t the only viral moment involving revenge. A worker’s story of revenge earlier this month on the CEO that was “a decade in the making” delighted the internet . Meanwhile, a teen’s revenge after being left out of a family photo pleased viewers last month. In addition, the internet enjoyed a student’s $400 revenge on their roommate .

TAIPEI, Taiwan: Most Internet users trying to get past China’s Great Firewall search for a cyber tunnel that will take them outside censorship restrictions to the wider web. But Vincent Brussee is looking for a way in, so he can better glimpse what life is like under the Communist Party.

An analyst with the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, Brussee frequently scours the Chinese Internet for data. His main focus is information that will help him understand China’s burgeoning social credit system. But in the last few years, he’s noticed that his usual sources have become more unreliable and access tougher to gain.

Some government websites fail to load, appearing to block users from specific geographic locations. Other platforms require a Chinese phone number tied to official identification. Files that were available three years ago have started to disappear as Brussee and many like him, including academics and journalists, are finding it increasingly frustrating to penetrate China’s cyber world from the outside.

“It’s making it more difficult to simply understand where China is headed,” Brussee said. “A lot of the work we are doing is digging for little scraps of information.”

One of the most sweeping surveillance states in the world, China has all but closed its borders since the start of the pandemic, accelerating a political turn inward as nationalism is on the rise and foreign ties are treated with suspicion. A harsh zero-Covid policy has contributed to the attrition of foreign residents, particularly after a long and bitter lockdown this spring in Shanghai, China’s largest and most international city.

At the same time, academics and researchers have complained that the digital window into China seems to be constricting too. That compounds a growing concern for China experts locked out of the country amid deteriorating relations with the West. A tightening of Internet access means observers will struggle to decipher what internal pressures China’s leader Xi Jinping may be facing and how to keep track of Beijing’s diplomatic, technological and military ambitions.

Comprehensive analysis on whom China’s Great Firewall keeps out is scarce; much of the focus on the country’s Internet freedom remains on domestic censorship. But many researchers who have experienced such challenges suspect that their limited access is part of China’s attempt to ward off what it sees as international meddling, and present its own tightly controlled narrative to the outside world.

Several researchers, for example, noted difficulties accessing Xinjiang government data from abroad, likely a response to international criticism on reports of forced labour and human rights abuses against the western region’s Uyghur population. More puzzling to Brussee was when he encountered similar barriers to the government website of Anhui province, a decidedly less controversial part of China.

Brussee said websites have also added guards against data scraping, limiting how much information he can retrieve via automation on public procurement of surveillance systems, policy documents and citizens or businesses affected by the social credit system. Some bot tests known as Captcha require manual input of Chinese characters or idioms, another barrier for those unfamiliar with the language.

China is keen to project an image of power and superiority. But that has been undermined at times by embarrassing revelations, including recent videos of Shanghai residents protesting harsh lockdown restrictions. The posts were quickly wiped from the Chinese web but continued to circulate beyond the Great Firewall, challenging Beijing’s claims that its zero-tolerance Covid policy was better at containing the pandemic than programmes in the West.

Comments on China’s Internet can also cast an unflattering light. Earlier this year, users on the nation’s Twitter-like Weibo platform drew condemnation for sexist comments welcoming “beautiful” Ukrainian women as war refugees. An anonymous movement that translates extreme and nationalistic posts from Chinese netizens has outraged state commentators who call it an anti-China smear campaign.

In order to squeeze through bottlenecks, Brussee uses a virtual private network, or VPN, which routes an Internet user’s web traffic through servers in a different geographic location. Though it’s a commonly used tool for Chinese netizens to circumvent the Great Firewall, Brussee’s aim is to appear to be visiting websites from within China’s borders.

But VPNs aren’t foolproof. Chinese authorities have cracked down, making connections in and out of China slow and erratic. Brussee said he went a month without a VPN last fall, when his main provider inexplicably stopped functioning. After five fruitless calls to the company, he could only wait for service to eventually resume. His last resort would be to use a Chinese company with more reliable servers inside the country, but he said installing Chinese software comes with additional security risks.

“I don’t think the VPN is enough anymore a lot of the time,” said Daria Impiombato, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who uses VPNs to bounce around to different locations when trying to visit Chinese government websites. “You find workarounds, but it takes way longer.”

One alternative source of information that Impiombato has relied on is WeChat, the ubiquitous social messaging app owned by Chinese gaming giant Tencent. Many party agencies have their own pages on WeChat where they post notices, but it requires a lot of mobile scrolling to find the relevant material, she said.

Signing up for an account, however, has become more challenging for foreigners in recent years as Chinese platforms like WeChat, Weibo and others have implemented additional screening, such as a Chinese phone number and official identification. In some cases, those registration requirements can be more prohibitive than geoblocking, ruling out resources from online discussions to official documents to industry databases.

Graham Webster, editor in chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center, has searched for a way to use Weibo since losing his Chinese phone and subsequently his account. The closest solution he could find was a service that provided temporary, and he suspected fraudulent, phone numbers.

“We are talking about something that would be on the Internet for one-fifth of the world’s population and not for the other four-fifths,” Webster said. “This is one more wedge in a steepening curve of barriers between China and the outside world. It leaves a lot more ground for suspicion and uncertainty.”

Blocking foreign Internet users, particularly from sensitive information, is not unique to China. According to a 2020 report from Censored Planet, which studies Internet freedom and censorship, the US government had blocked about 50 websites from being viewed from Hong Kong and mainland China, including official military home pages and stores of economic data.

But China’s control of information appears more expansive. The government, according to researchers and academics, had made files and data available online over the last decade. But in recent years – as China has become more sensitive about its global image and more critical of the West – that degree of openness has run into a trend to deter outsiders from peering in.

“It’s the effort of openness coming up against the current push towards closedness,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The result is some strange hybrid landscape, where you can have access to a lot of information if you go through all these hoops, specifically because they are not designed for you to have access to them.”

Some who have developed ways to bypass blocks were reluctant to share details, aside from generally trying to emulate a Chinese location, fearing those channels would be plugged as well.

“Describing to a newspaper the workarounds to access blocked Chinese sites ensures that the workarounds will be blocked, too,” one US academic researcher wrote via email. “The only thing I can add, without cutting short my own career, is another common sense measure, namely, scrape and cache whatever one discovers the first time around.”

That’s turned into standard practice for Impiombato, who has grown paranoid about saving her own copies of everything as government webpages, news releases and social media posts have vanished unexpectedly amid her research.

“Sometimes you see the perfect piece of information that you need and then suddenly it’s gone, she said. “You almost have to start from scratch every single time.”

Katherine Kaup, a professor at Furman University who studies China’s ethnic policy, said the country’s changes have forced her and others to consider entirely new research topics and techniques. She has reservations about one day returning to China for field work, and even virtual discussions with people in the country have been dampened by concerns over repercussions for speaking too frankly amid a growing clampdown on dissent.

“I sometimes feel like I’m in a bad sci-fi movie,” she said. “The type of research that we used to do is not going to be possible moving forward in the next few years.” – Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service