I had running battles with the asshats (a.k.a., Anonymous Cowards) on Slashdot for the last three months, starting with the asshat who falsely accused me of threatening to shoot him, the asshats who claim that only “real nerds” making $200,000+ per year in Silicon Valley can read Slashdot, and the other asshats who hound me for being the fat retarded kid on the short bus. For some of these asshats, replying to my comments isn’t enough for them. They started their own comment threads without me, posting how I sucked my cock all day (this is what a $100,000+ university education gets you these days). I took all this in stride as success in life means putting up with all the haters. That is until I noticed a user account in my pen name, “cdreimer” (4974007), replying obscenely to my comments as if they were from me. This was no longer personal, it became business. At the start of the Memorial Day weekend, I filed a DMCA takedown notice to protect my pen name and, indirectly, my copyrights. This morning I “pwned” the account, “cdreimer” (4977441) — and silencing the asshats for a while.
My user account, “creimer” (824291), existed ten years before I started using my pen name for publication and prior to the Dot Com Bust in 2001. I never bothered to create a user account for my pen name as I didn’t consider Slashdot as a platform for attracting a literary audience. With the asshats hounding me day-to-day over my comments that drove traffic to here (my personal blog), Slashdot became a new ad revenue stream for my side business. I read and write my comments as I normally do each day, the asshats make an epic fuss, and curious readers click on my “homepage” to come to this blog and enter my somewhat broken marketing funnel for generating revenues.
Another reason for keeping my venerable user account is that I have accumulated 9,167 karma points (see the output below from my Python scraper script).
Pages Processed: 623, Comments (Accepted/Total): 9319/9336 Oldest Date: 2008-08-04, Newest Date: 2017-05-30 Scores (9167) | -1: 76, 0: 384, 1: 6969, 2: 1004, 3: 400, 4: 328, 5: 158 Bonuses (1250) | Flamebait: 32, Funny: 298, Informative: 199, Insightful: 331, Interesting: 269, Offtopic: 47, Redundant: 11, Troll: 63 Total Time: 00:12:39.00
That was something that the asshat who created the “cdreimer” user account found out in short order. A new user, or “n00b” in the Slashdot vernacular, starts off with little karma. Moderators (mods) will reward karma points to promote (up vote) a comment or demote (down vote) a comment. Those karma points get added or subtracted to the user’s karma count. Too many negative comments will reduce karma to zero and restrict comment posting to twice a day. After a handful of negative comments, “cdreimer” got sidelined by bad karma. That, of course, prompted another user account, “criemer” (4975517), with the letters “e” and “i” switched around, to come into existence, starting this thread where asshats turned on each other as they thought it was me. When I pointed out elsewhere that it wasn’t me, I got called a liar.
Since I get up voted more than I get down voted each day, and I’m a lifetime away from ever having zero karma again, I don’t have to worry about the mods. If I was posting under “cdreimer”, I would have to cultivate karma points (or “karma whoring”) quite carefully for an extended period of time. Given my “rabid” following on Slashdot, I’m sure they will give me hell all the way.
I haven’t filed a DMCA takedown notice in years. Since I started publishing my ebooks in 2010, I would occasionally receive a Google Alert informing me that one of my FREE ebooks got posted in some obscure corner of the Internet. A DMCA takedown notice was easy to prove since I can point to my author website as the authoritative source for my ebooks. Over the last seven years, I’ve never had a DMCA takedown notice rejected.
Technically, a DMCA takedown notice doesn’t apply to user accounts. As an attention getter, a DMCA takedown notice is quite effective. I pointed out that I’ve used my pen name for ten years, the three-day-old “cdreimer” account got created for the express purpose of harassing me, and provided the nine comment URLs that my Python scraper script found. When the account got deleted this morning, I immediately created a new user account and posted a comment to prove that I own it now.
As I tried to explain to the asshats, this is business. I have an obligation to protect my pen name and my copyrights. If I don’t, they become worthless over time.