Today I noticed a huge wall of spam from UniversalMonk from 2 different accounts and didn’t initially think much of it and blocked their communities but more spam came from different communities.

At this point I checked and saw that they had created several communities which then led me down the rabbit hole to discover that their posts had almost entirely covered the new posts page of both sh.itjust.works and lemm.ee. Later on I discovered that they’re posting right-wing propaganda and misinformation from breitbart, foxnews you name it.

He’s already caused and stirred shit 2 months ago and clearly I can see why now.

At this point it’s difficult to believe that UniversalMonk will learn proper netiquette in: not post spamming, being considerate to others, and not sharing right-wing extremist content that no one wants.

  • recursive_recursion they/themOPEnglish
    20•10 hours ago

    I can see what you mean by that although for this case in an odd manner you actually want to highlight this problem.

    This is another parallel system that was shown in this crazy GDC talk: 1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality

    For background context Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott launched premium mobile games to the Google Play Store in 2013 which unfortunately didn’t “help in making our money back and being able to make enough money to make the next game”. After having explored the storefront and finding nefarious apps and junk reskined clones everywhere they decided to intentionally flood the Google Play Store with junk slot machine games as a joke/experiment.

    "There was a point in here that I don’t think was drilled home as hard as it could have been which was… if people are sneaking by with garbage the thing that we did was to put a huge neon sign with an arrow pointing at ourselves and the garbage next to us; illuminating the entire underbelly of dark weird App Store shit and so the idea that if you do it at scale clearly they’re(Google’s) going to notice and clearly they’re(Google’s) going to change the terms of service slowly to ice you out.

    Hopefully others went down with us in the wake of that. Like we provided the perfect targeted spot to drop the missile uh so hopefully, hopefully that helped get rid of duplicate apps that were also in the area."

    • ThePowerOfGeekEnglish
      14•10 hours ago

      I agree with you. In this case it’s time to bring this up. I quietly blocked monk months ago because I was tired of seeing his shit in my feed, but I didn’t want to bring attention to his inflammatory posts. But that clearly hasn’t worked on a wider level. He’s still posting sketchy stuff and annoying other people here. Sometimes you have to call people out and the wider community has to act, even at the risk of drawing attention to the problem users.