• CrayonRosary@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    A “burner” account? Never heard it called that before. “Sock puppet” or just “puppet” makes much more sense.

    • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It’s pretty common for people to refer to these types of accounts as burners on Twitter. I recall the GM of the 76ers getting in trouble about 5-10 years ago for having sock puppet accounts on Twitter and all the reporting referred to them as burners.

    • Beefy-Tootz@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Burner feels like such an old school term. I’ve more often heard “alt”, “Smurf”, or “finsta”. The last being a portmanteau of fake Instagram account

        • FloMo@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I always remember “toons” referring to your character, rather than your account. Kind of like the “cartoon character” you’re playing is how I understood it.

            • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              8 months ago

              Last I played years ago I think you could have 10? And that was per server, there were tons of servers to choose from, so if you wanted more, you could.

            • FloMo@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Yes, up to 10 per server, and you could have characters on multiple servers.

              I remember seeing the term even while playing pre-WoW MMO’s

        • moody@lemmings.world
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          8 months ago

          Isn’t a smurf supposed to be an account from an experienced user/player that’s meant to make them look new or lower ranked?

          Smurfing is when a high-level player trolls the lower ranks below their skill level.

          Lots of players have smurf accounts for games where high- and low-ranked players don’t get paired together, so they can play on the same team as their lower-ranked friends.

          • Instigate@aussie.zone
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            8 months ago

            This is absolutely what a ‘Smurf’ account is - someone who is very experienced or has a significant backing behind them accrued from other account(s) creating a newer account to pose as an inexperienced player in order to be matched with them. In World of Warcraft, a ‘Smurf’ is a character that you intentionally don’t let past a certain level and throw a tonne of gold and gear at so that when they come up against regular players that level they have an insane advantage.

    • SinningStromgald@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Guess they don’t think their readership is smart enough to know what a “sock puppet” or “puppet” account is.

      • Instigate@aussie.zone
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        8 months ago

        I never understood why Americans call a ‘#’ a ‘pound sign’ but then if you put words in front of it, it suddenly becomes a ‘hashtag’. Shouldn’t it be a ‘poundtag’? I mean the rest of the Anglosphere refers to a ‘#’ as a ‘hash’ so it makes sense to us, but why do Americans call it a hashtag? Seems weird to me.

        • GiantRobotTRex@lemmy.sdf.org
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          8 months ago

          It’s contextual. If it’s used in a phone number, it’s a pound sign. If it’s placed before a number, it’s a number sign. If it’s placed before a tag, it’s a hash/hashmark/hashtag.

          No one would pronounce “#foo” as “pound foo” any more than they’d call a #2 pencil a “pound two pencil”. Because “pound” is clearly not the right name in either context.

          Americans have been comfortable using different names for the symbol in different contexts since long before hashtags even existed. So when websites started using them and referred to them as “hashtags”, that was fine. It was a new context so it could use whichever name it wanted. (Well, “octothorpe-tag” is probably far too unwieldy to catch on.)

          Of course if we’re talking about the symbol without a specific context, then we have to pick one of the names. For most Americans, that “default” name is probably still “pound”. Twenty years ago I’d definitely say that, but even then it wasn’t ubiquitous. It wasn’t uncommon to hear it referred to as a hash. And it seems like the use of “pound” has declined and the use of hash has increased as people now spend more time online and less time dialing phone numbers. There’s also a generational divide with older people more likely to say “pound” and younger people more likely to say “hash”.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Others have already answered better than I, but it’s basically just a symbol to signify a weight, pound.

          It was already repurposed to be a symbol for numbers, when they are part of a sentence, and now it’s being repurposed even more so for the Internet.