The niche story/support communities were a real staying power for me until they started taking a nosedive ~5+ years ago. Suddenly power-users were showing up, posting their creative writing exercises in all tangentially related subs, and it got ate up because over the top drama is more entertaining to some than true (or at least very plausible) stories.
It began with users policing others. You called out a fake story and you got half a dozen people playing devils advocate asking how you knew the story was fake. The poster being a serial poster who has dozens of box-ticking ragebait stories (per week) across multiple subs isn’t a clear enough indicator that this is a creative writing exercise for them.
Before long, subs were seeing much more engagement due to copycats and drama seekers; suddenly the rules prohibited calling out fake stories. Suddenly your support subreddit for offloading about your abusive parents has turned into the personal playground for creative writers with 58 part epics about their mother getting arrested for the fifteenth time for brandishing a knife at a baby at the family dinner.
I’ve already unsubbed from a community on Lemmy because I’ve seen one creative writer is cross-posting to Lemmy under the same name.
Personally, I used to be an amateur shill spotter in my free time, but 8 years ago I was in an auto accident on my way to work that left me paralyzed from the waist down. Shitty as it was, it was honestly the excuse I needed to finally pursue my passions with all this new free time I suddenly had, so I basically went all in and became a full-time shill spotter.
It was going well at first, but I quickly found myself hitting a wall. Lot of shills were flying under the radar that I didn’t see until it was too late. Turns out it wasn’t me, but bad equipment. My fiancee, who sadly passed away a few years ago, bought me this pair of SpezTech credibility goggles that have really elevated my shill spotting game. I wouldn’t have thought I needed them, but now I honestly can’t imagine how I ever went without them. It makes it so much easier to spot astroturfed product placement.
That same pair has held up really well over the years and I probably would have been fine with just the original, but I did get a few specialty pairs that I use for calling out fake sob stories and political bad actors. They weren’t the cheapest, but for what you get out of them, they’re well worth the money.
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