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Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

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Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#61

Post by abalone »

prawn wrote: post #60
abalone wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is he didn't do that critical second step, the "burrowing through emails or checking blog comments" for something that links the IP to a friend. He made the mistake of responding to the criticism of his story's technical implausability by claiming his friend used a procedure of looking up the IP location on a general web database. But those only resolve to ISP-level geolocation, not user-level, as the very po…

I must've missed where he claimed that he didn't do those things? Their specific methods were always suggested to be something "like x" rather than exactly like it. Further, he didn't need a method that worked at identifying all people (as tripped up 90% of people in the linked explanation), just this particular one. I run a forum and often try to identify/discourage PITAs. Sometimes just tracing an IP reveals nothin…

He said it was his friend's house, not a workplace, so your theory is pretty weak.

He didn't say his IT wizard did something "like" geolocating the ISP, he said it was "almost identical" to geolocating the ISP.

Furthermore if there were some magical additional steps or wonderous circumstance that did bridge the gap between ISP-level geolocation and personal home address, he has absolutely no reason not to spell them out.

Unless he's lying.

You know, what's really fascinating about this whole thing is not why this guy would fabricate a dramatic story about him confronting a troll. That's easy to understand. It's why some people have such a powerful need to believe it. So much that they bend over backwards to find some exotic explanation around all the holes, rather than seeing them for what they are.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#62

Post by wccrawford »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #41
woodchuck64 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But after you've received some hate messages, it also sounds like the kind of thing that you'd learn pretty quickly. He can't know in advance if he has a troll following him, and he likes to reciprocate followers. Should he, in a sense, penalize followers because of a troll? I don't see anything in the original story about the delay between July 2009 and making his twitter account private. Is there anything to thin…

This makes no sense at all to me. If you're getting 2-3 people a day following you, and then sending you hateful DMs when you follow back, you seriously keep refollowing random people who will presumably be harassing you? It's not punishing anyone to put a bit of an effort in to seeing if the person seems legit before following them back.

I'd even go so far as to say that if you don't care enough about the person to research them before following them, then you shouldn't be following them anyhow.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#63

Post by woodchuck64 »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #41
woodchuck64 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But after you've received some hate messages, it also sounds like the kind of thing that you'd learn pretty quickly. He can't know in advance if he has a troll following him, and he likes to reciprocate followers. Should he, in a sense, penalize followers because of a troll? I don't see anything in the original story about the delay between July 2009 and making his twitter account private. Is there anything to thin…

This makes no sense at all to me. If you're getting 2-3 people a day following you, and then sending you hateful DMs when you follow back, you seriously keep refollowing random people who will presumably be harassing you? It's not punishing anyone to put a bit of an effort in to seeing if the person seems legit before following them back.

If you have 20 new people a day following you and 2-3 are trolls, I'd still do it. No troll is going to make me change my polite behavior with other people.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#64

Post by ryguytilidie »

wonderzombie wrote: post #57
ryguytilidie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of logic works to a point, but if 2-3 strangers are following you per day on twitter and then when you follow them back, they send you hateful messages, wouldn't you consider at least getting to know the person/changing your behavior? I get that you wouldn't think its a big deal if it just happened a few times, but the guy is screaming that it was happening 2-3 times a day and we are wondering how he possib…

You talk like these were the only 2 to 3 strangers that ever followed him, that only trolls followed him. Was that the case? How are you to distinguish between legitimate followers and not? The whole OP reads like a string of conjectures just like this one. I kept waiting for some firsthand knowledge of the matter, some smoking gun, but mostly it was a lot of innuendo and assumption. There's just not a lot of "there"…

My point is simply that if you're going through a period where 2-3 people are harassing you in the exact same manner, every day, you might consider changing your behavior to stop it from happening. I know I would.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#65

Post by roguecoder »

When Twitter first started many people auto-followed back anyone who followed them. There were apps to make this easy; I never did, but it was pretty common and was how conversations would take place. Twitter dynamics have changed significantly since the time period he was talking about.

Re: Why Leo Traynor’s troll story may be a lie

#66

Post by prawn »

abalone wrote: post #61
prawn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must've missed where he claimed that he didn't do those things? Their specific methods were always suggested to be something "like x" rather than exactly like it. Further, he didn't need a method that worked at identifying all people (as tripped up 90% of people in the linked explanation), just this particular one. I run a forum and often try to identify/discourage PITAs. Sometimes just tracing an IP reveals nothin…

He said it was his friend's house, not a workplace, so your theory is pretty weak. He didn't say his IT wizard did something "like" geolocating the ISP, he said it was "almost identical" to geolocating the ISP. Furthermore if there were some magical additional steps or wonderous circumstance that did bridge the gap between ISP-level geolocation and personal home address, he has absolutely no reason not to spell them…

People run businesses from home. I outlined a reason someone wouldn't spell out specific details and others have written more too.

Will leave you to it, I think.

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