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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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This theory would work only if the account has a large number of comments/ is very active. Pseudonymous account activity is power-law distributed. I.e a small number of accounts comment a lot, most don't at all.

I know 3 "normies" from the meat-sapce who use reddit. Their reddit accounts are literally all generic posts in hobby subreddits such as /r/cars,r/programming,r/memes. Those accounts would fail your test.

And moreover, I use reddit for buying/selling things too. I have a very "clean" account for that where I rarely post anything ever at all, given I don't want people who will see me in real life to know about my dickstretching habit. I think similarly a large contingency of people will use a "clean" account devoid of any dickstretching for business reasons.

tldr; I think your model will produce mostly false negatives.

A preponderance of false negatives isn't a flaw if the harm of a false negative is negligible (at worst opportunity cost) while the harm of a false positive is high (thousands of dollars, who knows what else).

The two use cases I pointed to where I've noted its usefulness on reddit were r4r and buying a luxury watch. If I miss out on a Rolex because i didn't trust the seller, the harm is that I don't own a Rolex for whatever period it takes me to find a trustworthy seller, which might be no time at all if there are Rolex's available from sellers who pass. If I buy a Rolex and get scammed, I'm out two grand or more. If I miss out on an actual hot milf who wants to meet in my area because I don't trust the account's vibe, I've missed out on absolutely nothing as long as I have more applicants than available calendar dates, and on nothing but the time it takes to find a trustworthy account otherwise. If I get scammed by an online bot account, well as I type this I realize I don't actually know what happens then but I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be good for me.

So it might be limited to similar circumstances. It would not be a practical way to buy something I actually needed in short order. Or a practical way to assess the credibility of information I needed to look up regularly.

well as I type this I realize I don't actually know what happens then but I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be good for me.

Contact your credit card issuer immediately and ask for a chargeback or try to claim a fraud complaint. Sometimes the card company might actually allow a chargeback if they have sufficient reason to believe it was a scam (and you didn't sign a contract or such).

If that fails, you will probably have take the L unless you want to hire a lawyer (or some goons).

I was thinking less in the charge on credit card range than in the "How would you feel about your mother/boss/priest seeing these conversations?" direction. Or maybe the "Show up and get beat up and robbed" direction. But I've never gotten anywhere near either, afaik, nor do I really know of stories of people who have. But it's always the worry right?