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Thank you for the warning. As a member of the community for 10 years it saddens me to see sock puppets profilerate and derail the conversation here. I don't th

Thank you for the warning. As a member of the community for 10 years it saddens me to see sock puppets profilerate and derail the conversation here. I don't think it's reasonable to expect us to respond seriously to every throwaway account's "benign questions." It puts too much burden on the rest of us. On the other hand, leaving them as-is inevitably means conversations get derailed. This is their goal, after all. I'll opt for option B in the future and cross my fingers that I'm still able to enjoy the community in 10 more years. PS Thanks for your hard work.

dang 4y ago
People make all kinds of judgments about what accounts are sockpuppets (or bots, or trolls, or shills, or foreign agents, etc.) and in my experience they're usually wrong, not to mention usually driven by strong passions on divisive topics. So it's generally best for discussion if we just don't go there. I do believe there has been an increase in throwaway accounts in recent years as lots of users have gotten more sensitive about privacy, but that's not quite the same thing. Also, a username containing "throwaway" or similar isn't necessarily a throwaway account, since sometimes people end up keeping them for a long time.