50 cent

Dear Chinese guy

[Snip]


How can I stop being mis-represented by 50 cent party members? People on China firums keep on making new accounts very close to my user ID. How can I stop this?


Richard


Dear Richard.

This strikes a chord with me tbh...

Simply although this isn't what you want to hear, you can't. You can only make it unprofitable and or uneconomical for them to pretend to be you.... heh interesting coincidence tbh. A few years ago I shared the user name of somebody down to one letter. Everybody kept mistaking us for each other. So we changed avatars and sigs so people could distinguish between us.

Anyway my points are these:

Firstly make it not worth their time to duplicate you, you know like antitelemarketer tactics, this means long winded posts and or nonsensical opening statements. The kind that make people have to look in the dictionary but make perfect sense to your target audience. In that 50 cent types, including the western Sockpuppet and spying tech used on western civilians have critical weaknesses in that simply it is a very labour intensive process even the sockpuppet requires a person to actually look and process what it says. AI isn't THAT advanced yet. Thus if you use complex words which even natives have to use a dictionary to look up it wastes the time of the astroturfer if they are defaming you or whatever.

This is just a variation of the tactic used against aggressive telemarketers (telesales have gotten really rude recently I suppose it is because of the unpleasant job, no pay unless you get a sale and the sheer dire market conditions of the UK).

Anyway with telemarketers if you slam down the phone the call is over in <5 seconds, this is good even though they didn't get a sale. As it allows them to move on to the next mark..... if they can make a call every 20 seconds that's 3 per minute.... usually they have some sort of hit rate (TCG once sold stuff door to door in his teens, there was a 1/250 hit rate). Therefore this allows them to move onto the next one and eventually get the hit.

But if you waste their time then it disrupts the hit process and means it takes so much longer for them to get those hits. Online we can use TL:DR and also use complicated unoften used words which native English (or whatever you are typing in) it means the person who is pretending to be you has to actually stop and think as to what the hell are you actually saying:

Does a bear shit in the woods?

Is replicated by:

Do usrsine animals defecate in the forest?

We know defecate and forest are synonyms of shit and woods. Therefore quite quickly we can work out what it means even without knowing what ursine happens to be. We can probably guess as to what ursine happens to be. But for non native speakers and readers they'll look up defecate and ursine.... which takes them time...

This does a TLDR on them and it makes them less money = you're less likely to be target ted... low hanging fruit and all that.

Of course this may or may not work... but it is merely my own opinion.