Starayo

Boiled?! I’m not made of money.

When I was last in Japan, I basically lived out of konbinis. I mean, I also ate at restaurants all the time because it was so cheap compared to Australia, but for everything else, why bother cooking in my tiny-ass apartment when I can walk a few minutes and get a full, fresh meal AND some decent sake for less than a single dinner back home? They’re fantastic. Plus they all had ATMs that could use to get more cash out.

Also, when my flight home was delayed by a typhoon, I was able to eat full meals for a few days on just thirty bucks from the konbinis in the airport. No price gouging. Back home that would have gotten me a shitty sandwich at best.

It’s bloody difficult.

I used to mod on /r/videos years and years back. We had this one guy who was not very active as a mod in the day to day stuff, but was respected because he’d basically disappear for a few months and then reappear with a huge post in our modding sub basically going “so these are all spammers/malicious actors, here’s their profiles, the accounts were created in these waves, here’s where they’ve copied existing posts / the identical generic comments and things they use to get around our posting requirements, the targets they’ve been promoting, etc”. Just huge pages of thoroughly researched proof.

This was well before we had huge awareness of situations like Russia manipulating social media - it was usually those viral video places that buy up rights to videos and handle licensing and promotion. It’s why for a long time any licensed videos from places like viralhog etc were outright banned - they were constantly trying to manipulate reddit postings in bad faith, and even trying to socially engineer the mod team in modmail, so any videos that mentioned a licensing deal in the description were automatically banned from posting.

If we didn’t have that one guy spotting the patterns, most of it would have gotten by easily. Unfortunately he did eventually disappear for good. No clue what happened to him, hope he just cut out social media or something. But with the spamming and astroturfing stuff… Even after fighting it for years I can’t tell you what to do to counter it besides “have more of that guy”.

Yeah, I just set up a catch-all and use individual emails for everything, like the gmail + trick but without sites rejecting + characters occasionally.

Of course, I have several domains and one is a .rodeo that some older sites refuse to believe is a TLD so there’s that problem…

I highly recommend Dankmus on YouTube for anyone. You can listen on other platforms but they also have accompanying videos.

No wonder it took so long, must’ve been a nightmare to get every different app neutral, what with their differing weights.