Seeing that the Zimmerman and Sandusky speculation threads were some of the longest and most heavily viewed on this board, I would say that your analogy doesn’t play here.
It’s called an analogy. Of course the consequences are lessened on a message board, but the behavior is very similar.
Ok, your analogy is completely off here. First, there was TONS of evidence in the Sandusky case. Mountains of it. But it brings up a good point. Let’s say instead of an eyewitness account of his crimes, there was a comment, or you thought Sandusky looked a little too friendly at times with the kids. Let’s say there was no direct evidence of anything…no eyewitness accounts to the abuse, no victims stepping forward, none of that…just a gut feeling. Do you think it’s OK to come out and accuse someone of that? The accusation ALONE in cases like that can completely destroy someone’s life. Now, if they’re guilty, I don’t feel bad at all that scum like that get what’s coming to them, but you better be sure before you start throwing stones.
Look, I’m certainly not equating child molestation with trolling, but the basic premise stands. I don’t like to indict people for things of which I have no proof. I find it amazing that so many people here are willing to do that.
Please explain in detail - what are the consequences of being called a troll?
Yeah, whatever. After pages and pages of your crazy overwrought screeching at everyone who doubted the troll, now that it’s undeniable that she was a troll, you’re trying to make some ridiculous case for how horrible and wrong it was for everyone everyone who wasn’t as stupid as you were to doubt the troll.
I assume you mean when the person in question is truly innocent…
By one person? Not much. By tons of people in a thread with a huge amount of views when it’s done to someone who ISN’T doing anything wrong? It forces someone who may have found a home here and people to share with to basically either put up with a heavy dose of personal attacks, demands that no one else on the board has to deal with (provide identification), or leave. These aren’t really acceptable outcomes for someone whose sole transgression would be having and interesting life.
It’s really a form of bullying…
Think about how you would feel if you were in Umkay’s shoes if it had turned out that her story was 100% legit. You have a community you grow to love…you then have some serious medical issues that cause you to be in the hospital for a few days. In that time frame someone plays a cruel joke and when you come back the whole community has turned on you and is calling you a liar and demanding you provide more personal information to prove you are who you say you are. Don’t you think that would be a somewhat painful thing to go through?
Now, in this case, the doubters seem to be correct, but before convincing evidence came to light the case was rather thin.
But you have also said in the past to trust your instincts.
It harms no one to express doubt about a poster or the content of their posts. Blatant accusations of trollery should be avoided and handled through proper channels, but being skeptical and saying it so is not equivalent to putting anyone on trial.
I never said ANYTHING about it being stupid to have the doubt. I was upset that people were willing to flame someone on very flimsy evidence. Sorry that I subscribe to the innocent until proven guilty thought process. You don’t know me…and I couldn’t give two shits that I was wrong.
Ready…I was WRONG! OH my gosh…I was WRONG. Happy?
I’m still not going to go around accusing people of things without proof.
I agree with you. I have no problem with people who expressed doubt. I found it extremely jerkish, though to have those blatant accusations of trollery, and they were plentiful by several posters throughout this thread PRIOR to any real evidence.
You are completely underestimating the evidence that people already had to suggest trollery. Did you see the post Giraffe had some ways back about the impossibility of her rapid-fire posts?
I had brought this up myself, as had others, but Giraffe actually linked to some of the more egregious posts. There is no way that any speech-to-text software can achieve this level of formatting/multiquoting/editing complexity with that kind of speed, and suggesting that her caregivers were able to do it by her direction is even more implausible. That caught my attention from very early on, and I have no experience with internet trolls.
Got a link to where sezyoo does the same?
OK, now that I have read more of sezyoo, I must reluctantly admit you may have a point. The farther you get into the sezyoo posts, the more it starts to resemble umkay.
BUT I still say some of your similarities are grasping. Half the dope has “slangy usernames.” “Real name starts with C” applies to >1/26 of the population, so it’s hardly a smoking gun. “Rich quad with a cheerful outlook,” well, that’s kind of self-selecting, isn’t it? poor quads wouldn’t have access to the tools to post easily on message boards, would they? And morose self-pitying quads wouldn’t be likely to entertain an “Ask the…” thread. “Candid about sex” … have you ever seen IMHO and MPSIMS?
Some have called her “Too good to be true”… which is odd, because it seems to imply that a rich, good-looking, well-adjusted quad is impossible. Tell that to the late Christopher Reeve. The whole “crushing on you” thing was kind of ridiculous. She was an entertaining read (like >50% of the people here) with an interesting life story to tell. Not a magical pixie fairy.
The real damning stuff is in the details. Say what you will about trolls aping different styles, but to pull that off consistently without slipping is IMHO, pretty tough, even for professional novelists.
So, with that in mind, stuff like the prevalence of bankers and tech recruiters in both stories is far more fishy.
So why the *'s? What a weird affect to assign to one’s trolling persona.
Have been and am, actually, but of a niche board, where we get far more spammers than trolls (and spammers are a lot less subtle)
Anyway, I don’t know what the fuck to believe anymore. Seems like everyone here has pronounced their verdict. While there’s some evidence amongst the chaff, and I’m leaning toward troll as well, I’m still not 100% convinced, though umkay’s recent silence is looking worse and worse.
But I’m also perplexed by the “if she’s not a troll, why not give the admin’s some id? Anyone would do that!” Really? I’d never do that in a million years. If someone called me a troll, I’d laugh, ignore them and just keep posting. No random stranger on a message board has a right to verify me as real. That’s just silly.
Actually that would be one solid point in favour of her being real. Shesh Pepsi is clearly the drink for trolls.
I will say that this is much less entertaining on Monday than I’m sure it would have been throughout the weekend.
I was a little suspicious of Umkay from the start but mostly apathetic about it since it seemed harmless even if it wasn’t real. I just treated her posts like a novel and figured I would either be proven wrong or right sometime in the future.
I must say that the weekend Dead/Not Dead/Troll progression moved much more quickly than I ever would have thought and I’m a little sad I missed out on the detective work because that’s pure entertainment no matter what the outcome. Research is a lot more fun where there is no job depending on it and the results are not personally impacting.
Dude…look. I was a snarkpit headliner for years. I collect internet enemies like Pokemon cards. I have had the bizarre sensation of knowing that dozens of strangers on the internet really, really disliked me, mostly for stuff I thought was bullshit. Have you?
When I tell you that you are completely without perspective here, I know what the fuck I’m talking about.
I don’t think that’s really evidence though. If a ‘troll’ can do those things, why couldn’t her carers? Does being a troll somehow give you super editing skills that other humans don’t have?
Anyway, this has gotten quite off track. I’ve made my point, accept it or not. Doesn’t really matter to me. I’m not going to change how I handle things with people because I was wrong in this case because I think it’s the most prudent way to act in general. Many people here obviously disagree, and I guess that’s fine too.
And I get the impression you enjoyed every bloody second of it. Your name is in the FAQ’s under drama whore.
Wow this has gotten impossibly ridiculous.
There’s no reason there should be “sides” like this at this point. The game is over. Yes you should be nice until you have proof, and yes this is supposed to be the smartest board on the net so the skeptics did a good job sniffing it out, which is a process that always starts with a gut feeling.
It is such a pointless thing to argue now that we know the truth, it’s not like the doubters were flooding her own thread with baseless accusations. The investigative work began on this seperate thread as people began to express their feelings that this all seemed a little off. They were right, let’s all learn to be a little more critical (though not hard) and call it a day.
As for the people who are still being assholes and mocking the ones who expressed feelings for this fictional person when they thought she was dead, just shut up already. Obviously some people are more sensitive than you and you don’t need to rub salt on the wound just to make yourself feel so much smarter. There’s nothing wrong with caring about things, the fact that the situation was fabricated doesn’t retrospectively change that.
As has been mentioned a couple times now, this thread is 100% troll food. So are we going to continue arguing over nothing for several more pages and reward Sezyoo/Umkay’s work even further?
I guess so…
This is simply incorrect. There are some very impressive YouTube vids of people using that software. An adept user of it could easily accomplish that level of posting. I’ll scare up a link later.
I posted off board that the only thing which stood out was the very fast and relatively precise, and very wordy use of either a caregiver’s time, or voice-to-text software. I’ve tried using voice-to-text many times as I suffer from repeated wrist injuries, and found then painfully slow to use, especially on websites, and fraught with errors. Yes I’ve seen videos now of other people using such software very quickly but I still have my doubts that it’s that easy to use quickly in a message board environment. And I’ve also communicated with people with serious physical disabilities who use VTT and other means, their communications are almost always brief, to the point, and contain no special formatting (or a bare minimum). Also, the very lengthy narrative style of writing seemed very odd, and reminded me of some other posters who came, were a 7-day’s wonder, and suddenly left.
However, I didn’t peg her as a troll or sock, just noted it was odd, and didn’t spend much time thinking about it. I’m no troll hunter and on my list of duties for the Straight Dope, “taking care of the message board” does not appear. Umkay could be a person who due to their disability has untold hours every day to spend with their software, thus becoming a Mozart of VTT use.
I also confess that despite my doubts I’ve seen no compelling evidence, let alone proof, that umkay is anything other than she really is. All I see is a small pile of circumstantial evidence which seems interesting. But I also wonder how many of us, if a group of a score or more posters started scanning around, might find an entirely coincidental doppleganger on some message board somewhere, at some time? In the past on this message board I’ve been accused of being different people - for a time there were some who honestly believed that Fierra and I were the same person - even though more than a score of Dopers had met both of us IRL and testified to that fact, some of the “sock hunters” passed it off as “lies, all lies” and were demanding the same sort of proof (post a video of you getting an “SDMB” ass tattoo while holding up today’s newspaper, etc.) And when I changed my user name from Anthracite to Una, there were at least 2 or 3 threads where people bitched to the Administration about “why does Anthracite get a sockpuppet,” being too utterly jaw-droppingly stupid to understand a user name change. And I can’t tell you how many times people PM or mail me asking/claiming I’m really Cecil now. I’ve also at one time or another been “accused,” in all seriousness, of being a quadriplegic, a hermaphrodite, a priest, a 70 year-old man, a hooker, and a member of State Congress. I’m undecided which of the aforementioned I would prefer…
Despite my doubts about the VTT issue, I’m putting this in the “could be a sock, but don’t see anything compelling and actually don’t really care all that much” drawer. I think some of the glee over this issue from those claiming “sock” is actually jealousy manifesting itself in a different way. Several folks were clearly angry at how “the interesting newbie” was fawned over by scores of Dopers, and are now having a good laugh at “oh, how the mighty have fallen.” The same sort of jealousy/schadenfreude process has been going on since 1999 on here, starting probably with Wally and moving on through a lengthy cast of characters.
I’ve been following all of this along, from various threads and here’s what I don’t understand… in the beginning when the suspicions were nothing but supposition, the skeptics were told that their belief she was a troll was nothing but (rightly so) a hunch and that there needed to be hard evidence before anyone should permanently castigate her as a fraud. Since that was the case, how was the board to get said evidence without those skeptics, their fanatical devotion to exposing her and the resulting “witch hunt”?
If it hadn’t been for them and the way they approached this situation with their diligent research, they wouldn’t have been able to provide the one thing that has supposedly been required of them for everyone to see her for the hoax she is. All the people that didn’t doubt her, and refused to hear any speculation to the contrary, how else would you all have known she was fake? Because how I’m reading all this here is that it was better to be duped that to want incredible proof for a fantastical story and that for (an admittedly small) some, even piles of corroboration is not enough still.
Finally, on a really tiny scale, I don’t think I get the mindset that calling those skeptics ‘evil’ while retaining the moral high ground after the ‘reveal’ and yet, refusing to suss out the information demanded is a laudable one. That truly makes no sense and is the one position in this thread that I find most bizarre. It is exactly killing the messenger.
Wait, because you handle dislike by others without consequence, then everyone does equally! Good news for emotional bullies! They don’t actually hurt anyone! Yes, I’ve had people dislike me for things I think are bullshit. It’s happening right now, and I’m OK with that, but not everyone will be.