I reserved commenting on this here until I could reach out to the admin of Lolcow. To be clear, no, I’ve never created a fake scrote thread on Lolcow, made threats toward users, or attempted to deceive anyone. However, I did attempt to speak up for myself on /meta/. After two posts, I was redtexted with “(stop)”, and got a ban message telling me I can e-mail them to “try” to disprove it, but they “know it’s me”. As I said before, I lurk very, very often. I see how the sudden appearance worked against my case, but it just didn’t feel right to sit things out, so I acted on impulse. I’ll own up to that much, because that was actually me. As a sidenote, I have never posted an image of myself or one that's related to myself on lolcow.farm, and I never will.
The biggest cause of confusion seems to be around Opera's VPN function. It offers three regions. Europe, Asia and Americas. They each come with their own IP or proxy range. I primarily use Europe, so that's where the majority of my mod posts stem from. Anyone who installs Opera and uses Europe is likely to receive an IP from the same proxy range as myself, or even the same IP itself. In this sense, anyone could hypothetically impersonate me on Lolcow. Anyone who uses a VPN is probably used to receiving ban messages that were obviously meant for someone else.
That said, to sum things up, Lolcow’s admin and I spoke over e-mail, but we couldn’t come to an agreement. She came into the exchange mostly unwilling to believe that there could be any actual room for confusion, insisting that "proof was posted", and my IP was linked to multiple threatening posts and spam. After asking two or three times, she tried to get me to expose my real IP, essentially opening myself up to actual doxxing and tracking to prove it’s not me. She did this while insisting that she had my IP, anyway, which was strange. She somehow went from “Opera VPN won’t save you, ham-chan. You are using a cheap VPN, so it’ll be hard to trace all your posts” to “You’ve never used a VPN, you just thought you did, so your IP leaked. I already have your IP, but reveal it to me, anyway”.
I can’t tell if she did this out of some misplaced spite, a clever form of misdirection from heat that was placed on her, or if she’s just completely sure of what she’s saying, and won’t even pause to consider that she might not always be right. Either way, my trust in the current Lolcow administration’s integrity is low enough to put me off sharing my actual IP, or anything that can be seen as personal information. She’s completely free to mark whichever posts or information that are most convenient to this narrative as “me”.
Since she was deliberately vague about how exactly she concluded things, from our own understanding, it appears that Lolcow’s staff have amassed a large amount of VPN posts, and are presenting them as a single user.
She did mention using linked cookies to identify posters. I found it strange that she chose not to mention that openly on /meta/, instead choosing to talk about proxy ranges.
The cookie explanation is kind of weak as proof for a lot of reasons, but if it's true, and the staff does actually utilize software that uses cookies to track users and catalog their every post, I think it’s somewhat twisted to not have informed the user base of that from the very beginning. To anons who may not have previously known about this, be very careful about what you share on Lolcow. Under its current ownership, privacy does not seem to be entirely respected. It remains questionable whether your information is safe in their hands.
At the risk of “shilling” this site, we don’t do that on Asherah’s Garden. We have no interest in starting drama with users, keeping tabs on them or covering our asses if we fuck up. You can criticise us and tinfoil all you want. As long as you’re not a scrote or tranny, you can rest assured we’re not going to do anything about it, other than read your posts, consider what you’ve said and maybe respond. At most, we’ll delete intolerable shitposts, trolling or spam, and if it becomes a problem, we’ll just actually start logging IPs, announce that we are, and ban you if you keep it up. Nothing drawn out, no autistic traps or mind games, no powertripping bullshit.
I understand how juicy it is to hear about a mentally unstable, false-flagging admin of a scrote-made board, and that’s why I’m sure some anons may cling to this whole thing. That’s alright, and if the doubt is heavy enough to make the site feel uncomfortable for anons to use, I take no issue with stepping down as admin and never being seen or heard from again. In the end, I’m just another anonymous user myself. There’s still another female mod, and the site remains open to applications from anyone who would like to own it, as it has been from the start.
Edited last time by iridium on 02/10/2020 (Mon) 23:32:37.
4 posts and 7 images omitted.