Well I’d vouch for your realness, but then we’d cancel each other out.
I can see your point. I think it’s good that I have tougher skin now. But I also think people should try to be nice to each other.
I can see evidence for accusing** umkay** of being a sock, but I’m not convinced there was sufficient evidence to ban her. That seems unfair. I guess we’ll never know.
Horseshit–sympathy trolls can easily become money trolls–they’re on the same exact spectrum, it’s just a matter of degree. And it’s not a big leap from “My baby has lukemia :(” to “OMG! My insurance was just cancelled! My precious baby will be taken off of chemotherapy!”
We even had one here years ago who made that transition (or tried to)
See that’s what I’m not so sure of. If I go and pick a random “Ask the..” thread, like, say this one:
NOTE: I AM NOT CALLING LANCE STRONGARM A TROLL, NOR AM I ABOUT TO DO SO.
We’ve got a new poster (Joined Jun 2012) “claiming” to be a parent of a disabled child, writing in a cheerful enough manner. But he says right up front he won’t get too specific because of internet creeps. If this thread goes on long enough to develop a following, will his story become “extraordinary” as he reveals more and more details, but keeps his boundaries? Will people commending him for his thread be seen as feeding a potential troll? Surely somewhere out there someone has at one time trolled a message board pretending to be a parent of a DS child. If someone digs up old posts from that troll, do they automatically cast doubt on Lance? How recent would the other troll have to be to link them? How close would the screen name have to be?
AGAIN, I DON’T THINK HE’S A TROLL. THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE. I’M JUST TRYING TO SAY THE FOLLOWING:
Anyone opening an “Ask The…” thread will, by definition, have something interesting in their life worth asking about. Is having an interesting life really extraordinary? When you compile a list of details about a person’s life, the longer the list gets, the more unlikely for someone to fit it. But that’s true of any person.
I’m not expecting a breakdown and apology. Honestly a “got you! suckaz!!!” would be more likely. And as you said, slinking off would be more likely still. But if you expect her to go away, what’s the point of a ban?
The mods have to use their judgement with banning, of course, and their word is final, but it just seems hasty here to me.
Well, yeah. “Ask the rich, funny, sexy, wonderful-personality-ed paraplegic girl” is something that maybe demands a little more skepticism than “Ask the tax attorney,” although certainly someone on the internet can lie about that, too.
I think in part it depends on your familiarity with people doing this kind of thing. Once you’ve seen this happen before or someone calls your attention to the possibility that this is fake, it starts to fit into a very familiar pattern. We have not had a whole ton of frauds like this, but we’ve had a few, and we’ve certainly had trolls. The fact that someone was caught pretending to be a very similar person to umkay on another board just a month or two ago is a pretty outrageous coincidence, don’t you think? (Even the names were similar, if my experience with that type of thing counts for anything.)
Wasn’t going to happen. She was closing up shop: she’d said she wouldn’t do anything to prove she was legit, she said she was no longer going to post to the ‘Ask the girl in the wheelchair’ thread, and so on. Eventually she’ll probably show up on some other board and try to trick generous people into flocking to her defense.
It’s true. A lot of my reaction to her postings was that she talked so purty. I wasn’t ever part of this Oh, brave quad," thing, but I thought she had an engaging and witty style. I still do.
Yeah, I’m just fuckin’ with you, killa. I like you. No beef with you. Just teasing you.
Not necessarily. There was a “Ask the Child Of Privilege” type thread which amounted to “Ask the upper-middle class kid with the absolutely average life with no life experience who thinks that having carpeting in every room and a couple of TV sets makes you SUPER ULTRA BILL-GATES-LEVEL rich and super-interesting to all the peons” thread.
How the hell’d I miss that. That would have been awesome! I’ve got so many questions!
We had a similar, but far less elaborate/well-organized situation with Fried Dough Ho. Those of us who doubted that her life had been all that she claimed (Made out with Anthony Bourdain! Lived on a boat! Raped 3 separate times! Got to attend a sooper-sekrit Freemason ritual thingy) were basically told that we were jealous and why couldn’t we believe that someone had a more interesting life than we do.
Of course the end to that story was that FDH ended up banned. I never did find out why, though…
Please. Go. Stand. In. The. Corner.
Fortunately, it would have been pretty hard for umkay to have made that transition, given her claims of wealth.
No, and sometimes it makes sense to become more skeptical of a given story over time. But the cute sexy paralyzed skydiving funny quadriplegic goes a few degrees beyond just “interesting,” doesn’t it? Detach yourself from your experiences with umkay for moment and imagine that you’d just gotten a letter out of the blue from someone claiming to be that person with that life story. Would you believe it?
It’s not that the elements of the story are impossible or that the umkay story is that much harder to believe than the lives of some other posters. There really are amazing people out there. (Some of them are too busy living their amazing lives to join a message board.) It’s that taken all together, her story and her persona really were a little too much. Add in the fact that a similar person - a young woman in California with the exact same type of spinal injury and a similar name and a similar username, although the sezyoo writing style was maybe a little less literate and youthful - was just caught pulling a con on another board.
In real life you don’t usually get the amount of proof you are seeking, unfortunatley. Trolls don’t often 'fess up. For one thing, confessing implies remorse, and for another, if they are in it because they want people to love them and fawn over them, they’re not going to renounce the emotional attachment they feel they have won by admitting it was based on lies. On a message board, you can’t demand someone answer a question and stop them from getting away. They just don’t have to answer a question like ‘Why did you do it?’ and they usually won’t.
Sometimes. The. Long. Odds. Bet. Pays. Off.
Maybe. You. Shouldn’t. Twist. People’s. Words.
See. Above.
That’s the real clincher. umkay showed up here out of the blue just a couple weeks after the other one was was outed over there.
Here you go. Did you know that the super-rich’s kids can drink milk four times a DAY??
That and other gems can be found in the above thread.
Ah-ha. No wonder your posts are bitchier than normal. You’re having your period.
I wrote this in the what the f*** thread,
I shall have my humble pie with a side of crow please
CAPT
Of course, a sympathy troll can become a money troll, and when they cross that line, they become contemptible scum. A sympathy troll who stays a sympathy troll is just sad. umkay was just a sympathy troll and showed no signs whatsoever that she would be anything else.
Left myself open for that one, I did. :smack: 