Recently, these devices have been quite a hit in Japan and many people have them at home.
At dawn, you see the sunrise. At dusk, you see the [new poster]
…starting a series of threads detailing the problematic romantic relationship he’s in and asking for advice from a bunch of strangers. Is anyone else’s spidey sense tingling?
Check out IMHO, for “Psycho Ex,” “Long-Term Relationship,” “The Stars Align,” and “Late 40s.”
Good catch.
Well, Ive done that. And gotten good advice.
You started four threads on your problematic romantic relationships within two weeks of registering your account?
Starting a thread about your love life once you’ve gotten to know the community is one thing. Four threads as a new poster is sus.
Joined: July 21
Threads asking for intensely personal advice, sharing a whole lot of details including slightly weird ones (“She wanted to … put moisturizing cream on my hands”) on:
July 25
July 28
July 28
August 3
A new poster who opens threads on provocative topics is invariably a troll. (At least, I’ve yet to see a counter-example.) They want attention and are self-aware enough to initially avoid crossing any lines. Intentionally, they are not bannable at this point, but it’s obvious enough what they are. Being who we are, some Dopers take the bait. So goes the life cycle.
Oh yeah, that’s a troll.
And damuriajashi just taps dances around the systemic racism and ignorance that the people that he supports pushes.
It is what I pointed before, racism is a virulent form of ignorance.
Sooo, anyway, not-quite-so-new poster Smartbulbinc has been sending out little twitches to me for some time. Join of June 2022, and within 2 months has started over 10 topics, most of which are pretty factual, and not prone to typical trollishness.
A few definitely felt provocative, like the “Why should I PERSONALLY care about politics” (emphasis in original) and the more recent ‘Lie Detector’ one as well, but still, just occasional twinges of doubt.
In their most recent thread, where they ask why we have chosen to stick with messageboards rather than modern social media though, they claimed to be 19 - and I don’t believe it. Note I am not saying that 19 year olds can’t type in complete sentences, or use text based message boards, but nothing in their style, topics, or tone seems to reflect that.
And again, the comfort with jumping in with that many topics in that short a time, with no prior mention, combined with my disbelief at their style compared to their stated age feels like an old poster either trying to rehabilitate themselves or a serial sock coming back.
Feel free to talk me out of it, I claim no certainty, but have many suspicions.
The name continues to be the dead giveaway.
Yeah, that poster is definitely an idiot or a troll or both. No good will come of that dim bulb.
Foxtrot_Tango pops up in GD after 3 years to opine, “I’m sceered Biden is going to destroy the Earth. Trump was so much better!”
Idiot or troll?
Luckily it was shut down pretty quickly.
Definitely “idiot”. “Troll” optional, because if they were trolling they did it idiotically.
The account only has three total posts, and the other two were made in 2019. That speaks to a certain level of deliberate action that smells of sock or troll.
And yet they burned a three-year-old account posting that idiocy.
This is a great example of why the forum software should show join date and number of posts of a poster with each post they make. Yeah, I know it’s clickable, but important information should be more readily available.
(Same thing for the time and date of a post–don’t hide it behind a click.)
That or, you know, have an up/down vote feature the members can use, just so long as it doesn’t get disabled by the community. Oh, wait… (actually, I honestly don’t remember: is that one of the features discourse offers, but which this forum does not use? It’s hard to be ironic these days.)
We’ve never used up/down voting, even on vbulletin (and I think that was one of its features). I think that the worry is that unpopular voters will have their voices silenced by too many downvotes, but I don’t know how that’s supposed to work.
Anyway, IIRC, the reasoning is that the SDMB is not a popularity contest and we’re not going to turn it into one. It’s not like we don’t have fairly effective methods of dealing with the twerps, after all.
Fwiw, discourse doesn’t have downvoting. It does allow you to “like” a post, and keeps stats on how many posts of each poster were “liked”.
People tend to “like” posts as an easy way to say “thank you for answering my question” or “i agree” or “I’m sorry/happy that happened to you”. You can generally tell from context which it is.
I think codinghorror is right that upvoting is a lot less toxic than downvoting, but it doesn’t do anything for trolls.
(Liking posts is disabled on the SDMB.)
I’m still bummed y’all seemed to have gotten around the loophole where by @discobot could “like” posts if you thanked him. Was this done to spite me?