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Yikes. I imagine that happens a lot.
Everyone always talks about their alt accounts, and every time I hear about alr accounts, I'm like "you guys have more than one account"?
But of course they do. And the craziest people like you say will use them to market or take advantage of the system.
This guy has accounts with bios that align with identity groups he wants to speak on behalf of, and they're like all co-mods, all talk in the same idiosyncratic way. Their comments always include links to not very reputable news sources identically formatted. They comment on each other's posts with the same canned responses, and are basically the only approved submitters to his subs when he starts out.
And when I talk about different identity groups, this guy has/had profiles with bios like: "I'm a trans woman!" "I'm an anti-fascist satanic atheist!" "I'm a larger woman who isn't shy about her beauty!" "I'm a Jew!" Then he'd jump in to debates and be like "as a..." and quote himself. "u/princessdragonslayer" used to post nsfw pics of "herself" and quote this guy in the post titles.
It's also funny cause he self-publishes books that are conflicting in their politics and tries to make sure redditors don't know. He has a pro-cop book that's basically fascist, he has a rape-pill book about "Why Men and Women Can't be Friends," but on reddit he plays a liberal guy who posts anti-Trump stuff 24/7/365.
Whaaaat wow that's amazing and uncomfortable.
How do you even follow all of that? Did you just fall down a rabbit hole?
If he tries to make sure redditors don't know his accounts are connected, how did you find out?
I was on a random sub called badchoicesgoodstories and there was an odd essay/conspiracy post about Hitler that seemed off, because it quoted statements Hitler had made in campaign speeches and purported them as factual accounts of the Nazi party policy. I commented that this was a bad way to approach what amounted to campaign propaganda, and that I had family history that diverged from the claims this post had made. I had also quoted from an encyclopedia which is considered first line reference material for the Third Reich. I found myself immediately banned from 20+ subreddits all at once for "spreading disinformation," and on questioning it, the person revealed themselves to be a psychotic narcissist, they also deleted my one comment then inserted a false quote of me in response to make me look like a Nazi.
Then I looked at other comments they removed and realized they basically do this all the time, found similar posts containing accounts of how shitty they were, then I started adding people who they were shitty to to a private sub where we could discuss this person (they basically would search their name on reddit and if anyone complained about them they'd go call them Nazis and harass them in whatever sub it happened to be.) So we basically created a list of all their current and previous alt accounts and subreddits, following their own gratuitous self-promotion to their Amazon pages, Goodreads reviews, their publisher company LLCs that published books between all their pseudonyms, one of which was a real-estate holdings company. They tried to get us banned for "stalking" them but since they promoted all of this on reddit themselves and operated as a public figure, their books, comics, memes, were all merchandised and sold through online marketplaces and vendors, there wasn't much they could do.
They had all their primary accounts suspended recently and lost all their main subreddits, presumably for harassing former co-mods, according to one of them. I currently mod a lemmy community that contains a snippet of their behavior and the full list of their alts and subs, although they've left their official name mostly behind and I think trying to keep a lower profile now.
Wow that's nuts.
I might have understood something, if this person used different usernames on reddit but also used different pseudonyms for each book, how did you tie the accounts together to reasonably prove it was the same person?
Reddit accounts were associated because their professional name was plastered on products they each advertised, whether it was books/comics/memes/nfts/tshirts, it was all linked to the same personal brand(s). They also all shared mod duties on the same subs, and the way they wrote comments/conversed was very idiosyncratic, they had catch-phrases and quotes that seemed to be of their own making. The subs they spammed and account length were also indicators, because they almost always all crossposted to whatever subs would allow their content, from a sub only they managed, in order to drive content to their personal subs. Another thing is mod teams (I was occasionally in contact with over this spammer) would report the user as ban evasion and reddit admins would be able to associate the account, which is how most of their accounts get banned. We realized they always tagged their own accounts as "Quality Poster" on their subs too, a tag that was reserved for only their accounts and a few others, and it was pretty easy to tell the difference.
For the self-publishing side and professional pseudonyms, he would use the same publishing company between his different pseudonyms, which is something that book sites often encourage you to search based on. On lets say Book Depository for instance the publisher of a book is a hyperlink, so you can "find other books by...", so it was like different versions of his name with different sort of professional personas. LLCs like a book publisher are all publicly filed entities through the business registrar in their respective states, so you can find out who filed the taxes, which consultant helped create the entity, just by searching the LLCs name on the government website. (I actually reported someone to the FBI once in relation to an act of violence because they had bragged about their shitty personal business on their online profiles, which they stupidly registered with their actual name to their home address, instead of properly with a PO box through a registrar.)
So really all it took was clicking on his own link to his own book, clicking the publisher name, and seeing all the books listed. In other words, doing the very thing he wants users to do on the site. However anyone who did this and mentioned it on reddit would be reported for stalking/harassing him, especially if they shared some of his content he didn't think fit with his current persona. Ie a quote from the rape-pill book, or a comic he wrote making fun of people who protest police violence. It was all about crafting an image that redditors would approve of so he could sell his personal brand on the site and avoid paying for ad services.
Dang that is crazy.
So did you and the sub you guys created to track this guy present your body of evidence to the Reddit admins and that eventually got him banned?
Do you guys track other users who are attempting to manipulate forms for personal gain or was it just this one guy who was so egregious that you felt like you had to to band together?
I used to mod defaults on reddit back around 2011-2015 and only really cared about spammers, so I developed a good eye for it and I'd often report spam on reddit through the formal process, or there were subs like r/thesefuckingaccounts to present spam networks, and a lot of times they would get reported and banned.
In this case the spammer is more aware, and they still operate on the site to some capacity, but they understood they had to be careful and try and hide it/not present it as "spam." They also basically harassed people who talked about them outside of their own subreddits and try to report and get rid of any negative discussion about them. When they spam it's like they act as a public figure, but they report as if they are a normal user who's being doxxed, even though they themselves spread their name(s) around the site. So I created a private subreddit and recruited (sane) people who had been mod-abused by this guy, and we collectively invited more people until we were a few hundred. Most of it was just making fun of him with cheap jokes and people venting, but we had a "current alts" list etc. and would contact mod teams if he was evading a ban with a new account. He only uses the most spammy trash subs now because of this, because any sub that cares about spam or quality of content has banned him many times by now.
I know of a few of these chronically online characters and they generally seem mentally ill in a certain way, so that complicates whether it's good to directly interact with them or not. There's a guy named John Mandlbaur who functions on a similar level. He thinks he's discovered a law of physics is wrong and is everywhere on the internet trying to present his findings for years on end, being a complete asshole to everyone, digging himself into a worse and worse place mentally. I remember someone checked on this reddit spammer in January after the holidays once, and realized on all the days people normally mark by spending time with friends and/or family, he was active on a bunch of his alts the entire time. In all these instances, instead of accepting they may be wrong about even a minor superficial thing, they see it as an affront to their grandiosity and appeal to grand conspiracy theories or very significant things to explain why someone disagrees with them.
I see. So far I'm really enjoying my migration to lemmy, I find it both easier to concede points in an argument and to receive actual answers and even have conversation instead of just endless squabbling over an apostrophe or autocorrect error.
The reddit gotcha culture was really wearing on me over there.