>>3935That's really bizarre that the two incidents are so similar. It almost does make me wonder if they're connected or are even being perpetrated by different people from a similar group.
I'll go out on a limb here and assume you're legitimate and not a troll yourself. I guess to prove my legitimacy I'll do a bit of an info/TMI dump, it's sort of the thread for it too since if the wrong people put the right info together they would totally know who I was:
Almost a literal lifetime ago I ended up getting waaaay too close to a guy I met through irc connected to 4chan (understatement of the millenia: I make bad life decisions, especially about boys). He was into some of the troll/raid-heavy boards on 4chan, and he invited me to join some of the like 28 channels he was in on irc, so I ended up getting a literal front row seat to some stuff (
I watched the backend of a Habbo Hotel raid go down and all I got was a lousy t-shirt ). Fast forward again a few years and I'm older, but not wiser, and it's same situation, different guy, but similar activity in the actual irc channel.
Both times, the situation was that there's a channel where people that frequent certain boards have collected, and then the guys interested in raids/trolling end up in a related channel with similar like-minded people with an insane level of devotion to trolling.
The trolling channels usually only have about 10 guys who are regulars, a couple more who are casuals, but then they all are also in like upwards of 10 other channels with a bunch of bored guys who'll come if someone called a sudden raid or something but otherwise were uninvolved and uninterested.
A lot of the guys were on irc 24/7, some had jobs or school so were AFK for certain periods, but some of them seemed to be right next to their computer all day (one of these incidents was pre-smartphone, behaviour has changed a bit now). I talked to (or tried to) a few guys who sort of centered their lives around irc and built irc bots that would send out alerts if there was something interesting going on, sometimes the bots were popular and in around 5 to 25 channels.
It didn't seem like their lives revolved around raids or trolling in general as much as it was a bunch of really intelligent guys who were really bored or understimulated. Usually there was one or two guys who were favorites, almost alpha guys of the group, who would become active suddenly and a lot of the inactive lurkers in the channel would become active as well to greet them. A lot of trolling/raids happened because these alpha guys would suggest it, or if someone else suggested it to them. These guys seemed to almost have veto powers, and if they weren't interested, it didn't happen. This behaviour seemed really similar to real life male social group behaviour though, so I'm presuming it's just a thing with male social group hierarchy.
Some of the channels were really super serious about trolling/raids and almost had a military-like precision to how they organized their trolling/raid incidents. Sometimes though, it would just start with one guy saying in the channel "Hey, there's a mouthy sjw in the whatever thread" and like two people would become active and start posting and badgering the sjw/troll-victim.
Usually it quit there, but if the victim reacted unexpectedly or one of the trolls got really angry, they'd do something like honk the bot to alert the channel to get more people to go to the thread. A few times, they used a call-out feature to alert people in all 25 channels the bot was in, and then a ton of people would pile into the thread and it would just be a shitstorm.
The planned raids were more organized though, one of the alpha guys would come active on a Tuesday/Wednesday night and start asking everyone who they should raid that weekend, and if somewhere was in the news or talked about a lot, or even if the alpha was pissed off at some specific place, then they'd decide to raid it. They didn't announce the raids ahead of time in other channels, but usually the agreement was for everyone to tell a friend or similar.
The night of the raid there'd be a ton of extra people in the channel, and it seemed like a few people would have visited the site and picked out where to hit it and how to hit it, they'd notice where there was opportunities to start infighting and then everyone would start shitposting. If it got "fun" or there was a reaction they'd do the call-out with the bot in all channels and get just a huge mass of people heading to the targeted site.
The really heavily planned and structured destabilization raids were different again. They were super heavily planned and the guys often picked out specific posters to target, either through baiting or copying their typing style. Those raids usually were small and intimate with 5 to 10 guys at the most. If they were going for a long con, they'd usually have someone keeping tabs and updating Alpha when he came online. If it got slow or unresponsive they'd start baitposting. If that didn't work by the weekend, they'd get really frustrated and usually do a bot call-out for a standard raid and then go back to recon after the weekend. If it got really boring they'd end up dropping it to focus on something else they could get a reaction out of.
This got way too long, sorry. I should also possibly post it via Tor but you only live once I guess.
