As someone whose first web presence was an Animal Crossing forum in 2007, I’m getting really tired of takes that the AC fandom was “way nicer” before New Horizons. If anything, NH has measures put in because the fandom used to be SIGNIFICANTLY worse.
Let’s talk about seeding.

In New Horizons, people are unable to take your trees or flowers unless they have been added to your Best Friends list - i e, are people the player trusts and gives the conscious decision to consent to it.
This comes after New Leaf and prior games had a problem with griefing-

random users going into peoples towns, digging up holes everywhere, chopping down trees, and stealing flowers.
This is tame compared to seeding. This, at least, left your file and cartridges in tact and allowed you to rebuild what you lost without starting over. Seeding did not.

“Seeding” is a specific type of griefing that is, as far as I know, exclusive to Wild World. Basically, all the key points of a village’s map in WW- your house, your villagers houses, the stores, the gate, trees and rocks, etc etc -were items in the game called “seeds”.

When you made a new village in Wild World, these items were randomly placed on the map to create your town layout. Normally, these items are completely inaccessible. However, this was back when you could buy hacking tools at game sections of stores. Most notably, Action Replay.

With Action Replay, you could put in codes to access seed items and put them in your inventory. While they could theoretically be used for layout design, more often than not it was used for harassment. People would go to strangers’ towns for trades, then drop seeds everywhere.

This could leave entire sections of your town inaccessible, or make it so you could never leave your house after file select and be stuck in a loop unless you deleted your town. The most malicious- and most common- form of seeding, however, was bricking.

Bricking was when a seeder went into a stranger’s town, dropped as many seeds as possible, then left. The end result was so many items being in the game that it couldn’t load them all, and subsequently crashed. To the point that the player couldn’t even delete their town-

The game would crash upon startup, and the only solution was to buy a new copy.
This was a very, VERY prevalent problem. I’d see constant warnings of users to block and report specifically because they were seeders. Seeders even posted vids of themselves doing it.

So, please. Save me that “the AC fandom used to be good before the games were Mainstream (TM)” (which, FYI, they’ve always been mainstream). I didn’t see hundreds of peoples’ games get destroyed as a kid for people to have superiority complexes because they don’t remember. I do.

Idk if it’s too early to be That Guy or not but just in case: I was furloughed from my job last week and am out of an income for at least a month and a half, and I make plushies! My commission info is being revamped rn so I can’t link it but I am open if you wanna dm for rates.