Honestly feels more like a “read the room and chill the fuck out” thing to me more than outright trolling. Maybe with a “this board isn’t your blog” thrown in.
For ease of reference, the MW_Degen discussion in the THINKING thread kicks off here and runs a dozen-ish posts:
I quoted that in fact in my Email to the Modloop. I just got done with it.
Yeah, they’re an exceptionally skilled troll if they’re trolling. I’m not saying they aren’t one, because they really do say some oddball shit, but we have other posters just as weird or offensive at times.
So seriously, if they are a troll that’s a very good job of not tipping their hand to me. (I’m not doubting if the mods see something I’m not, that’s why they’re the mods.)
I will give the disclaimer that I haven’t read their latest thing and it might be more blatant now.
It becomes more obvious when you look at all 35 topics they started:
I’m almost certain this is available to all. https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MW_Degen_Gamblr/activity/topics
Damn, that’s a great point. It’s almost like pointillism (no pun intended), where you just see dots up-close, but when you back away you can see the real picture.
This macro view looks pretty bad.
He’s obviously playing a character, his weird out of date slang was a big part of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was also a sock.
I have my suspicions on that also and relayed that to the rest of the mods.
Pretty sure this was the first mention in the thread of him (for what it’s worth).
For me, he pinged my trolldar as a new “personality” created specifically to troll. My initial assumption was one of our longstanding trocks was spinning up another alter-ego. However, I had nothing but gut instinct that led me there, so it was worth all of what you paid for it…
Me too. Troll from day 1, mocking the sympathetic people on the board and stringing along “triggers” with fake douchebaggery the triggered (somehow) find interesting. There have been digs at “underlings” or whatever they call them, I cant go and search all the posts.
Right off the bat I simply never got the impression that this bozo was a real gambler, at all. [be he chronic, addictive, semi-professional, or what have you]
He most definitely is attention-seeking. I don’t get the sense that he’s trying to purposely piss people off, I think he just likes portraying an edgy persona. Both attention seeking and intentionally pissing people off can be considered trolling, but in my view the latter is more important to deal with.
I don’t like his contributions so I personally won’t be bothered if he’s disappeared, but I won’t advocate for it (yet).
He’s either:
- A troll, presenting a completely fictionalized persona
- An immature, impulsive person presenting an over-the-top version of himself for attention
Either way, between the provocative OPs and the crass potty humor, he’s not adding anything positive to the board, IMO.
That’s pretty much my POV. He’s real unconventional and as we’ve aged, a lot of us have gotten horribly conventional.
As somebody who’s pissed a lot of hours away in hotel rooms over a lot of years, boredom is a thing and having a ready made set of friends to converse with is a pretty attractive situation.
Whether that means he’s just honestly a bad fit around here, or whether that means he’s a constructed persona trying hard to press the boundaries of “fits/doesn’t fit” is beyond me.
ETA:
Perhaps said another way, he’d have been a plausible member of our brigade of “colorful characters” 20ish years ago. Now, not so much.
It’s not like he hasn’t come up in this thread before - and generally not in a complimentary manner (cause, duh, Troll thread):
I’ve had conversations with and about him here and in some of the threads before I mostly stopped responding to them, around March/April. Whatever their intent and nature (where they have some degree of plausible deniability) they give off “jerk” vibes. Oh, not in the sense that they’re a jerk to other posters, but that they’re a jerk IRL, or the character is. The one that set me off first was the Computer Camp to date women, but the Queso thread, or in general, the aggregate/Macro view of their OPs tends to support it.
Not that many of us aren’t jerks IRL, or even (with delicate precision) here from time to time - but we mostly tolerate each other’s moments the same way you may do to family you’ve been with a long time. But very few of us (well, that haven’t gotten banned or are on their way) are quite this consistent in the way they demonstrate underlying traits. Or, well, are consistent but have come up against bright-line rules that keep them in check.
I don’t see whats wrong with “colorful” characters, first off.
I know quite a few.
Actually gamblr is not all that colorful. I think they’d like to be.
So there’s that shock value they try to add.
It may just be exaggerating and embellishment.
Really, we can learn a bunch from a younger person who’s probably an addict. Gambling addiction is weird. I think just about anyone can appreciate that.
They’re young enough to have that “I"m entitled” that is not a bug, but a feature.
And maybe there’s a loneliness factor in there, as well.
You do realize that’s the definition of trolling. We don’t want that and almost every online community has rules against it because it’s toxic.
to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content
That’s exactly what “exaggerating for shock value” is.
I suppose the underlying point is sincerity, or lack of same.
If we’re all going to interact with sincerity we won’t all always get along. But at least we can believe that the poster at the other end is a real person telling real tales of real activities to within the usual vagaries of human memory and embellishment.
OTOH, if you’re being real you and I’m essentially just writing a serial novel off the top of my head, inventing events and people and experiences and beliefs from whole cloth, that might be entertaining, but it has no place on this sort of message board.
Several Dopers are amateur or professional creative writers. They participate in online forums for that. But even on those sites there’s clear separation between them posting as themselves, and them posting their work as authors.
Martin Hyde was banned specifically for posting as a fictional person, providing completely fabricated personal info.
From what I remember, it wasn’t nearly as inflammatory as MWDG. Just mostly making up false info about their credentials to bolster their arguments. (That and threatening to dox some one, that was also bad.)
Eh, fooey.
It’s a message board.
Not a treatise on socio-philosophy ideology of generations of budding writers. (I just creatively wrote that).
Cecil would lose his shit.
He would have excoriated gamblr in 2 minutes. And everyone pissing their pants about his tale, in 2 more.
I had the first response in his “hotel room” funzies thread. And, that’s all he needed to know. IMHO