Welp, less than 24 hours after making this comment we got registrations for 5 sockpuppet accounts that have done nothing but upvote literally all of Piwo’s comments and posts. We have reverted all of those votes, and have now banned Piwo. Please don’t do this.
Hello. I am a different person who has been asked to paste here his answer to the ban on his behalf. Do not worry, I won’t comment any further or be active here.
”At times I am proud when I am being censored. These are the times when my convictions are deep and pure. It instills a sense of superiority. As if wondering when the rest of the world will catch up. As for upvoting, I did certainly upvote several comments that I liked. I rarely downvote. I recall that my comments had almost no upvotes which I attributed to my coming late to this article thinking its heyday has passed. My only concern was that nobody was reading and I was wasting my time. I do not treat commenting as a popularity contest. the word “sockpuppet account” I had to Google. I am not that literate in social media. I venture into this world only because the brutal violations of human rights that I witness on a daily basis.”
I don’t want to make this into a big internet argument but an explanation is in order I think. My account is incidentally also only a few days old so I won’t be mad if you think I just created it for the upvotes.
This article made the rounds in a community. I strongly suspect many of the members upvoted piwos comments. I am pretty sure there were no VPNs etc. involved.
I am very confident that one IP-address created at least 6 accounts for the express purpose of doing nothing but upvoting Piwo’s comments. Those were definitely not organic account creations.
We also saw some other new users show up and vote much more organically, and I was not referring to those. We might have accidentally deleted one of them, but the accounts I am talking about where really very obviously sockpuppet accounts created by one person.
Ok, if the IPs were the same I suspect some user(s) of the community went overzealous. This should not be taken as representative of the community and/or piwo. I know he has very strong opinions about education but I would vouch for him and pretty much guarantee that he did not try to upvote himself with fake accounts. Sorry about the mess.
PS: I respect that you did not delete piwos comments and can understand that this all looks a bit fishy and hope you can take it all with a bit of humor. At least you’re not the Signal admin that was overrun by Elon Musks followers :)
Could you let me know what user this was for? There is a chance that one of the accounts was not actually a sockpuppet (we banned and deleted 7 accounts, 6 of which had obviously invalid spam names, and one which looked very suspicious but we weren’t as confident that they were a sockpuppet account, so there is a chance we had a false-positive).
Welp, less than 24 hours after making this comment we got registrations for 5 sockpuppet accounts that have done nothing but upvote literally all of Piwo’s comments and posts. We have reverted all of those votes, and have now banned Piwo. Please don’t do this.
Hello. I am a different person who has been asked to paste here his answer to the ban on his behalf. Do not worry, I won’t comment any further or be active here.
”At times I am proud when I am being censored. These are the times when my convictions are deep and pure. It instills a sense of superiority. As if wondering when the rest of the world will catch up. As for upvoting, I did certainly upvote several comments that I liked. I rarely downvote. I recall that my comments had almost no upvotes which I attributed to my coming late to this article thinking its heyday has passed. My only concern was that nobody was reading and I was wasting my time. I do not treat commenting as a popularity contest. the word “sockpuppet account” I had to Google. I am not that literate in social media. I venture into this world only because the brutal violations of human rights that I witness on a daily basis.”
I don’t want to make this into a big internet argument but an explanation is in order I think. My account is incidentally also only a few days old so I won’t be mad if you think I just created it for the upvotes.
This article made the rounds in a community. I strongly suspect many of the members upvoted piwos comments. I am pretty sure there were no VPNs etc. involved.
I am very confident that one IP-address created at least 6 accounts for the express purpose of doing nothing but upvoting Piwo’s comments. Those were definitely not organic account creations.
We also saw some other new users show up and vote much more organically, and I was not referring to those. We might have accidentally deleted one of them, but the accounts I am talking about where really very obviously sockpuppet accounts created by one person.
Ok, if the IPs were the same I suspect some user(s) of the community went overzealous. This should not be taken as representative of the community and/or piwo. I know he has very strong opinions about education but I would vouch for him and pretty much guarantee that he did not try to upvote himself with fake accounts. Sorry about the mess.
PS: I respect that you did not delete piwos comments and can understand that this all looks a bit fishy and hope you can take it all with a bit of humor. At least you’re not the Signal admin that was overrun by Elon Musks followers :)
Could you let me know what user this was for? There is a chance that one of the accounts was not actually a sockpuppet (we banned and deleted 7 accounts, 6 of which had obviously invalid spam names, and one which looked very suspicious but we weren’t as confident that they were a sockpuppet account, so there is a chance we had a false-positive).