It’s impossible to tell if someone is asking in good faith or not. Bad money drives out good and all coins are treated as shaved. It doesn’t matter if yours aren’t. There are too many people asking in bad faith. If you want to know something controversial, there are places you can find out without making somebody else do the same work that other resources already have done.

Well, you actually can track and observe someone’s writing and pick it up when they switch accounts. There was one guy back on reddit that went through something like 30 before reddit got rid of them entirely.

It isn’t as easy as caps/no caps, but it is doable. The group, bigot watch, used to use it as a way to track bigots, report them, and warn users they it was a new enjoy account bypassing bans. But they went silent post api/app debacle since the people doing the work decided reddit was a dead end for their efforts.

Seriously, it’s a thing. It isn’t a perfect thing, and it takes work to do a proper analysis, so you can’t just scan a single comment and magically make the connection.

Which is tangential to your rant, but I figured you might be interested since it’s patently obvious nobody is doing their due diligence when they make a snap accusation off of a single comment or post. Even three comments from a top level comment with two sock puppets isn’t going to be enough. Well, unless they’re unusually long.

So, back to your point, it is very unlikely someone who gets a few down votes is being sock puppeted down. Not impossible, but unlikely.

And, like you said, if there’s no reason for someone to do it, why make that assumption in the first place? When it’s a regular conversation, jumping to that conclusion is kinda nuts.

Just saw a thread of people that think it’s a mods job to shut down arguments. Period. Full stop.

That is not what a moderators job is. They are meant to moderate; meaning you keep the argument going as long as it doesn’t devolve into name-calling and mud-slinging. Your job is to keep the conversation civil and on-topic.

If you think it is anything other than that: You should not be a fucking moderator. If you can’t keep your personal biases to yourself or not just have knee-jerk reactions to everything: you should not be a fucking moderator.

I get accused of being a troll a lot. The reality is that I am a part-time troll, however I only seem to get called a troll when I’m actually not trolling. Either this means I’m very successful at trolling, or I’m very unsuccessful at having normally perceived discourse, or perhaps even both.

I have a habit of being a sarcastic dickhead to people who I think are missing something obvious, or who I highly suspect of being a troll or other type of dishonest user account.

I decided to try, for a while, holding back on that. I would just explain why I disagreed with people, or why I thought their argument was terribly flawed, without needing to add any snark or rudeness to it. I was amazed at how much more productive the messages and conversations were. It sounds obvious in retrospect, but I somehow thought that the delivery would lose something if I couldn’t be an asshole at the same time I was delivering the message.

Live and learn, I guess.

i’m typing all lowercase with my left while i’m brushing my teeth. like rn 🙂

I do not believe I am neurodiverse, but I do know that neurodiverse people struggle with this as well. I don’t think anyone should be ridiculed like that for asking a question in good faith. It can be hard to tell at first glance if there is good faith, that’s why you should give them the benefit of the doubt. I struggle too because sometimes our own bs from life gets in the way, but we should be nicer to people who haven’t done anything wrong. And asking a question in NoStupidQuestions is not wrong.