this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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A "burner" account? Never heard it called that before. "Sock puppet" or just "puppet" makes much more sense.
It’s pretty common for people to refer to these types of accounts as burners on Twitter. I recall the GM of the 76ers getting in trouble about 5-10 years ago for having sock puppet accounts on Twitter and all the reporting referred to them as burners.
Drug culture is more well known among normies than nerd culture, is what we're saying here.
Yes. That’s exactly what’s happening here. Big shout out to drugs for winning the war…
It's like a burner phone, you use it for a short time, then throw it away. Like throwaway accounts on reddit. A sockpuppet is specifically to make it look like multiple people have a certain opinion (see also: astroturfing).
So in the case of the article in question, then, this absolutely refers to a "sockpuppet" and not a "burner" because Adrian Dittmann isn't going anywhere.
Don’t inject logic into the mental gymnasts all wanting to call it a burner anyway. It’s a lost battle. You’re absolutely right, though.
Elon more like Stock burner eh? Eh?
I like bad jokes
Burner feels like such an old school term. I've more often heard "alt", "Smurf", or "finsta". The last being a portmanteau of fake Instagram account
An alt account is one for a different purpose. For example, work and personal, not necessarily for espousing an opinion. A smurf account is one of many designed to overwhelm a system. A finsta is for satirizing yourself or shitposting.
And in World of Warcraft they called accounts "toons". I've never understood that one.
I always remember “toons” referring to your character, rather than your account. Kind of like the “cartoon character” you’re playing is how I understood it.
Does it let you have multiple characters under one account? I never played it, so I don't know.
Either way, that name never really made sense to me.
Last I played years ago I think you could have 10? And that was per server, there were tons of servers to choose from, so if you wanted more, you could.
Yes, up to 10 per server, and you could have characters on multiple servers.
I remember seeing the term even while playing pre-WoW MMO’s
Isn't a smurf supposed to be an account from an experienced user/player that's meant to make them look new or lower ranked?
Smurfing is when a high-level player trolls the lower ranks below their skill level.
Lots of players have smurf accounts for games where high- and low-ranked players don't get paired together, so they can play on the same team as their lower-ranked friends.
This is absolutely what a ‘Smurf’ account is - someone who is very experienced or has a significant backing behind them accrued from other account(s) creating a newer account to pose as an inexperienced player in order to be matched with them. In World of Warcraft, a ‘Smurf’ is a character that you intentionally don’t let past a certain level and throw a tonne of gold and gear at so that when they come up against regular players that level they have an insane advantage.
Guess they don't think their readership is smart enough to know what a "sock puppet" or "puppet" account is.
Sockpuppet is what I like to call them
'Burner' is to 'Sock Puppet' as #Hashtag is to 'Pound Sign'.
I never understood why Americans call a ‘#’ a ‘pound sign’ but then if you put words in front of it, it suddenly becomes a ‘hashtag’. Shouldn’t it be a ‘poundtag’? I mean the rest of the Anglosphere refers to a ‘#’ as a ‘hash’ so it makes sense to us, but why do Americans call it a hashtag? Seems weird to me.
It's contextual. If it's used in a phone number, it's a pound sign. If it's placed before a number, it's a number sign. If it's placed before a tag, it's a hash/hashmark/hashtag.
No one would pronounce "#foo" as "pound foo" any more than they'd call a #2 pencil a "pound two pencil". Because "pound" is clearly not the right name in either context.
Americans have been comfortable using different names for the symbol in different contexts since long before hashtags even existed. So when websites started using them and referred to them as "hashtags", that was fine. It was a new context so it could use whichever name it wanted. (Well, "octothorpe-tag" is probably far too unwieldy to catch on.)
Of course if we're talking about the symbol without a specific context, then we have to pick one of the names. For most Americans, that "default" name is probably still "pound". Twenty years ago I'd definitely say that, but even then it wasn't ubiquitous. It wasn't uncommon to hear it referred to as a hash. And it seems like the use of "pound" has declined and the use of hash has increased as people now spend more time online and less time dialing phone numbers. There's also a generational divide with older people more likely to say "pound" and younger people more likely to say "hash".
It's because it comes from the lb pound symbol, which became ℔, which when written quickly and sloppily became a sort of hash symbol, and then it became the # symbol we know today. Pound is the more accurate name for the context it came from.
https://www.pixartprinting.co.uk/blog/hash-symbol-secrets/
Others have already answered better than I, but it's basically just a symbol to signify a weight, pound.
It was already repurposed to be a symbol for numbers, when they are part of a sentence, and now it's being repurposed even more so for the Internet.