I must admit I mostly lurk there and never quite made the jump culturally to lemmygrad, but I do respect your opinions and the last few days are making me feel a bit insane and wanting an outside perspective. I’ll explain and provide links for context
A longtime user got banned for bad behavior in live chat on hextube. That part isn’t all that surprising. But then we got dueling impersonators one and two making meta posts about the ban and a notorious also-banned user he had conflicted with a long time ago (melina).
This was… mostly just annoying, clearly someone was doing a nasty bit, but mods just banned them both and the site moved on which I guess is fair enough.
Fast forward to today, and we have an account (not brand new, but not a longtime account either, only a few weeks old with limited post history) purporting to be our resident China guy (and China doomer, to some extent) from the news mega, posting a long winded story about going to xinjiang and getting 1984’d or whatever. It starts to feel like it could be a bit as it gets more and more absurd, but this user was always very serious from what I recall.
If this is a troll/psyop I guess it’s a good one because this garbage is giving me a fucking headache. What do you grad’ers think is going on? Were any of these real or all impersonators (and relatedly who? melina?) Am I just too autistic to get the joke? Is this a fed psyop? what else could be going on?
I can’t speak for all autistic people obviously (and I’m not very active in the ND comm) but I personally find it useful to have to check my skeptic skills in good fun. There’s reactionaries posting fake stuff that’s a lot more sinister than posts like the Xinjiang post, so it’s good to avoid letting my guard completely down. Obviously it does beg the question of why it wasn’t posted in fakenews but I think there’s a level of artistic license you have to grant to make a really good bit work.
Yeah I definitely don’t mean to speak for everyone, but I know a lot of us are very trusting or naive, I’m super naive which is frustrating because I am also a very suspicious/analytical person in some ways so when I get got I’m like…What the hell?! lol. And yeah the XHS post wouldn’t have worked if it was in fakenews; I’m not particularly upset about that one at all but other impersonation accounts can be pretty malicious and that is more what I take issue with, personally.