Pitchforks and torches! Tar and feathers! I mean getting taken in by someone is the worst thing in the world!
In general, I’d rather be “rolled” on an anonymous message board than falsely accuse someone of bad intentions. Especially when the alleged bad intentions can’t hurt me.
It’s still fucking tedious.
Yeah I sure wouldn’t want to do it, regardless of how much I might make. I respect those that do though and are successful at it.
Because socks only get easier to detect over time. The more often you use your sock, the more chances you have to slip up and leave evidence behind. Plus it’s human nature to get sloppier over time when you’ve not been caught before. You get overconfident that you are undetectable.
For example, you forget to log into your VPN or proxy, you mix up your accounts, you forget a tell that you’ve been consciously removing, you just don’t get all the way into character, etc. All are more likely to happen the more you post.
For what it’s worth, I don’t even see his post that got him a Warning as trolling. It just reads like someone who is socially clueless. He doesn’t get how to admit when he’s wrong, feeling a need to defend himself.
There’s also just the lack of reactions to his annoying stuff. A troll who gets few reactions tends to modify their approach to get more reactions. A non-troll will either stay the same or actually start trying to be less annoying. I haven’t seen CW modify his approach at all–that post in 2014 reads exactly as if he could have posted it today.
Trolls bringing back old socks aren’t usually that consistent. It’s hard to get back into a character you’ve previously abandoned.
(And, per the other thread, I don’t think revealing this stuff makes socking more likely, because deliberate attempts to avoid these things are themselves a good tell.)
Originally posted in the how to find friends thread:
Have you ever considered starting a kind of … oh gosh … I don’t know what they are called - but I know there are people who like to meet regularly and discuss books. Usually classic type books. Are these groups called “Book Clubs”?
Now he’s just trolling. I mean, still trolling.
Oh. I thought that title went to Acey or that dougiemonty wierdo.
And he started an IMHO thread:
So I asked “Charlie, are you really as naive as you present yourself? I think it’s obvious that the two products have nothing to do with each other”.
Myself, I think he’s posting as performance art. I assume he finds his performance amusing.
There is no possible way a post like this one is anything other than “Clueless Old Man” shtick. IMO this is one of his lazier ones:
Thread: “Your favorite movie countdowns”
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s sworn off a certain beer.
I haven’t put much stock in those who argue that he’s a troll, but his latest thread is making it harder to argue against them: what’s so bad about socks?
Yeah that has got to be a performance. He’s trying too hard to be cute now.
I just find all this a bit weird. He makes very extensive posts with a “clueless old man” type persona. If it’s all fake, the ratio of the effort he’s putting into the portrayal vs the amount of annoyance he’s causing is very high, if the objective is to troll. I mean, there’s a recent thread about car insurance where people have responded to his apparent cluelessness by explaining various issues - but it’s useful content, it’s certainly helped me understand some substantive factual issues better. I don’t see any way in which this persona has detracted from that thread - I certainly don’t feel I have been “trolled”, or that it particularly matters whether the persona is real or fake in that thread.
That’s the beauty of it!
In which case… as somebody upthread mentioned, perhaps “performance art” is a better descriptor than trolling.
That says more about performance art than trolling, IMO. Unless it is consensual and open, all performance art is trolling: to the extent it has a point, it is still trolling with a point.
Naw, he lost me completely with the “aw shucks” clueless bulkshit over in the thread about e-readers where he 1.) claimed to have worked closely with computers for decades, then 2.) claimed he had no idea what this newfangled invention might be, until 3.) Googling it, at which point he completely botched the entire purpose of a Kindle.
Throwing in an “Oh Ehm Gee!” for added wide-eyed naivete was a nice flourish:
I missed this performance the first time around. I have no words (although I might wish for a machine that might read them to me in a human voice). This guy is our own KenM.
Seems about right.
Didn’t Drunky have episodes of barely-coherent presumably drunken posting, or am I thinking of ten other people? If so, it seems unlikely that he’s Charlie, in a lot of posting we haven’t seen anything like that from him.