Well, it was a red flag to me because he was banned from THREE different websites. Usually, that would mean that he was doing something really heinous and horrible. And I’d want someone who had social skills that poor away from the site ASAP. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve never known anyone to get banned from three sites like that. I’ve known people who were banned from two different sites, and they were really terrible posters—and if I knew that person was on a third site, you bet your ass I’d report them. I’d seen the damage they wreaked on other sites, I’d want the jerk pulled out right from the start. This is why I asked the question.
It turns out though, this guy was in a position that made things different. The site I was talking about was Askville. And Amazon kind of caused this trouble themselves. He was one of those professional question askers from India. Instead of coming onto the site the regular way, he just opened up mTurk and would get a huge batch of questions that he answered with jibberish—either cutting or pasting unrelated garbage from random search engines or just answering with terrible broken English. He was ALL OVER the boards and annoyed a whole lot of people.
Because he only came to the site from Mturk, he never saw or participated in the discussion boards and most likely had no idea that people were complaining about his terrible jibberish. He also probably never looked at anyone else’s answers or anything. He just was plugging away, earning his pennies and then one day, he realized he was banned from mTurk—and he went out to see what was wrong and discovered he was banned from all these othere sites as well.
As much as he annoyed me, I don’t think he’s in a position to do that again. Amazon seems to have finally realize that giving out those accounts was a really STUPID idea and they seemed to have weeded out most of those people. I doubt that he’s going to participate much, since in the past the only reason he participated was to get his pennies.
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And I’m not some big grade school tattle taile.. meh.. I have had almost 20 years of online experience, and I know how hard it is to get banned from sites like this. I had made the assumption that he did something over the top terrible in the past and was very likely to repeat the behavior and I’d regret not reporting him before he got too out of hand.
But this—I feel like Amazon just did a major screw up and while he annoyed the heck out of me a few months back, he’s not going to do that again. He was getting PAID by the website that banned him to behave that way on the site. What the heck were they expecting?