politburo diktat 2.0

Frank J has a funny post. IMAO: End the Sock Puppetry Please!

I took the liberty of copying this comment by one “docweasel”

I’m an old hand at net forums, and real aficianados were expert at [sock puppetry]: you keep 5-6 sleeper “alters” (thats what we called them) so that if you got in a flamewar your defender hadnt just [registered] that very day, which is a pretty good tell that its a sock puppet. You posted with the various alters now and then to get their post count up, give them a history, even take contrary positions, so that when crunch time came, people would be like “wow, even Gooberheadly agrees with this guy, he must be on to something!”

This seems nuts, but I’ve seen it. You always wanna use proxies when you post with them so the mods (moderators) don’t figure you out. Also write in a different style, if you usually spell correctly, misspell words, use different grammar, pretend to be dumb, or nuts, or anythign to differentiate yourself. 5-10 allies on a net forum, even one with 1000’s of members, can seem like a virtual army, because the flamewar is mostly only of extreme importanc to you and the person you are flaming, so although people will watch with interest, they rarely get dragged into the nightmare (but it does happen, they can even take it over) so if you have 5-6 hard core defenders, you can say some really harsh crap through your alters and keep civil yourself, being the better man. Also, you look nuts if you have a second thought and keep posting posting posting, sometimes with all your posts in a row with no response: a sock puppet gets these thoughts out for you and seem to come from many sources, but all echo your basic philosophy and goodness.

This is much more rampant than people realize, you know. Setting up net fakery is old as the net and gets more sophisticated all the time. Only these idiots who don’t bother to use proxies and etc. to hide their tracks are getting busted. The greatest scammers are never caught because they are too good.

Posted by: docweasel on July 27, 2006 11:52 PM

Check out Frnak J’s post and other comments anyway, it’s very funny.