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I tracked down my impostor

theguardian.com

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Re: I tracked down my impostor

#5
Is there any verification of this story? The way it ends with "As told to Amy Sedghi" makes me think this is some spoken word story rather than some journalistic recounting of events.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#6
Reminds me of something I experienced on HN and Reddit, though my case was a far less significant level.

I posted a comment on HN in response to some article about Emacs. Later that day I saw someone had copied my comment word for word in reply to the same article on Reddit.

I still have no idea why someone would do that. I thought at first it was some kind of karma farming operation but the post history of the Reddit user didn't really fit that profile. Plus,it seems like r/emacs would be a really poor choice for that.

I've always been curious to know why someone would do something like this. It's interesting to read about it happening on a way larger scale.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#7
post #6

Reminds me of something I experienced on HN and Reddit, though my case was a far less significant level. I posted a comment on HN in response to some article about Emacs. Later that day I saw someone had copied my comment word for word in reply to the same article on Reddit. I still have no idea why someone would do that. I thought at first it was some kind of karma farming operation but the post history of the Reddi…

It's almost always bot accounts. Reddit is decent at catching bots so the botters copy legitimate comments, build a post history, and then switch to scamming or spamming after the account has some credibility.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#8
post #5

Is there any verification of this story? The way it ends with "As told to Amy Sedghi" makes me think this is some spoken word story rather than some journalistic recounting of events.

It just means that Amy Sedghi interviewed him, and then wrote it from a first person pov. It's not unusual.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#9
post #6

Reminds me of something I experienced on HN and Reddit, though my case was a far less significant level. I posted a comment on HN in response to some article about Emacs. Later that day I saw someone had copied my comment word for word in reply to the same article on Reddit. I still have no idea why someone would do that. I thought at first it was some kind of karma farming operation but the post history of the Reddi…

Did it make sense in the thread on reddit?

There are a couple of bots (I hope) on Stack Overflow that re-post answers to other questions that are vaguely related based on keywords or tags. They usually didn't make sense in the question context, but were upvoted by people for some reason.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#10
post #8
post #5

Is there any verification of this story? The way it ends with "As told to Amy Sedghi" makes me think this is some spoken word story rather than some journalistic recounting of events.

It just means that Amy Sedghi interviewed him, and then wrote it from a first person pov. It's not unusual.

Why aren't there any pictures of this imposter? Surely respecting his privacy isn't warranted since he's public with his imposter persona.

Not surprised I'm getting downvoted by people that support abusers.

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