I really wish that, if people have a serious suspicion that a particular poster is a sock of another, they would PM a mod rather than playing guessing games in the Pit.
This really serves no purpose. I suppose they are trying to show off how clever they are to other posters. However, in my experience, at least 90% of the public guesses are wrong. People often make the leap that a new poster that they find obnoxious must be a recent bannee, even when there is no similarity whatever between them.
Even if you are right, making your guess public before the sock is banned can be counterproductive. If he thinks he’s been found out, he can create another sock and move on before we can accumulate enough evidence to ban the original one.
We appreciate all the help we can get outing socks. I keep an eye on the “Trolls R Us” thread in case anything comes up there. However, a better way to do that is by sending any suspicions to the mods. Sometimes we’re suspicious already but haven’t identified a suspect or been able to make a solid case. A tip can help us do that.
If you recognized him, why didn’t you ever tell us for more than two years?
I did the investigation that revealed the Terr/Okrahoma connection. I’m not going to reveal the evidence, but it didn’t depend on posting “tics.”
An example: I used to post a lot on Mobileread, a site for enthusiasts of e-books and e-book hardware and software. We once had a troll who came there only to post on how horrible and civilization-ending e-books are. He came up with multiple socks–some to debate against himself, some to agree with himself. He kept pumping them out, I kept recognizing and reporting them. In this thread alone, he was four of the posters (taglines, honey, coolcat, and danbloom.) He had more. (I’m ardeegee there, from my initials.)
I just want to add that I figured this topic would involve specific cases, so I posted it in the Pit. I don’t really care about who was spotted this way or that way.
I’m only really interested in the methods by which people think they can spot socks. From the responses so far, it seems to be a mix of being extremely familiar with debates on a particular topic on one hand; and throwing them in the water to see if they float on the other.
I spotted socks a couple of times (and was really proud of myself when a moderator confirmed my suspicions). Some people have a really distinctive posting style. In one case it was a combination of that and some biographical details in common that led me to suspect.
There are no posts simultaneously listing Terr and Okrahoma as possible socks by anyone until after Okrahoma was banned. I can find no evidence that anyone reported any suspicions to the mod loop that they were the same before we began investigating in October 2017. Chronos was the one who made the first observation and proposal in the mod loop, and I followed up on it to document it with additional evidence.
Terr/Okrahoma didn’t share any of what I would call distinctive posting “tics.” The evidence was of a different kind.
Fair enough. Did anyone report him as a troll after Oct 2017? I don’t remember when I suspected he was, and I may have been prompted by others.
Maybe “tics” is the wrong word. Unusual marker, perhaps – they were both enthusiastic Trump supporting IDF vets who emigrated to the US, IIRC (and maybe a few other things like that). Not enough to be sure, but enough to be suspicious, perhaps.
I think my memory is off about this – I think I did report Northeast Refugee as a suspected sock of Terr/Okrahoma, so that’s probably who I’m thinking of having those same characteristics.
Relevant text: How The Leopard Got His Spots by Rudyard Kipling (full text) — perhaps could work for spotting socks too.
Could also happen when new troll drops in, gets quickly banned, re-appears as a sock, never having been here long enough to have learned that socks are forbidden. So he may not even try hard to hide the fact.
Shortly after I joined here, someone wondered if I was a sock of another recently-banned poster solely by a vague similarity of the usernames.
Chronos first raised the possibility that Okrahoma was a sock of Terr on Oct. 21, 2017, and he was banned the following day after investigation. Of course no one reported him as a troll after that since he was banned. There were a number of Pit threads about Okrahoma in which he was accused of being a troll and a sock, but no one correctly identified him.
What I mean by “tics” is idiosyncrasies of punctuation, wording, and so forth. Politics is usually too vague to give evidence that is unequivocal enough to support a ban.
I don’t find any evidence of a report in the mod loop. Northeast Refugee was banned as a troll rather than a sock.
The main thing about socks is that you can change your name, but you can’t change who you are. The only way to avoid detection over the long haul is never to talk about the things you like to talk about, and what’s the point of that?
