What a journey it has been.

To be quite honest, this was the first time I tried something like that.

I suddenly stopped posting with the alt because I had more pressing matters to take care of, and then I kinda forgot about it. So I figured, it’s now March, this has been going on since January, we need to finish this thing.

Strangely, not many people actually got the alt. Many were on the right track, but then accused someone else or didn’t make the leap to actually saying it outright.

I wasn’t sure how difficult this would be, and that’s why as time went on I gave away more and more information (such as the two questions answered). Still, I’m glad that many people knew to look at the alt account closely, even if they didn’t accuse it. It shows healthy scepticism.

In fact, only two people outright came up and pointed out the alt specifically as their choice. This means they would be the two winners, and in fact I’d already contacted them about it privately.

That’s right, the thing that seemed to trip most people up was that I didn’t confirm or deny accusations publicly.

But if you remember from the OG post, I said the hunt would end when I ran out of keys to give out (for the game in question). As I have 5 keys and only 2 people correctly, outright, guessed the alt, the game went on (I also figured people liked doing this so I didn’t want to stop it too soon).

And, in a real setting, I expect a sockpuppet or alt would not reveal their dastardly plan the first time someone accused them of being an alt. That’s why I personally did not answer publicly as to the identity of the alt, and why the alt account itself sometimes defended itself against accusations.

The clues

So let’s move on to the clues you didn’t catch before announcing the winners.

At first, I wanted this to be like an OSINT game where you’d find the alt by looking at data like when we both post, how we both talk, etc. It proved a bit difficult both for you and me, and so afterwards I started leaving clues and made it more of an ARG game.

If you remember the original post, I said I took some steps to make this alt as ethical as I could. This meant the alt had some rules to obey: it could not get into an argument with other users, it could not get too friendly with other users, and it could not post stuff that’s too serious. The idea being that after the alt was found, it would not have a long-lasting effect on the community. This placed some limitations on an OSINT approach as I was restricted on what I could post or comment with the alt.

A few days after I made that post, I posted some very telling things. First, I changed the sidebar to include this:

What would you find in !shitreactionariessay@lemmygrad.ml ? Well, that was the first community the alt posted to.

Secondly, a few days later, I made two posts with my CR8 account:

  1. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/501674
  2. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/504456

There was, for the cautious reader, a certain keyword that came up in both posts that you could use to help determine the alt’s identity. Did you find it? If not, here’s a third post I later made:

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/512279

It seems nobody caught on to these clues at the time, which prompted me to later make more posts to answer direct questions about the alt so as to help you out.

Later, I made sort of a mistake when I posted a joke on Discord with my CR8 account, and then the alt posted that joke too. One comrade caught on to it and first asked me if it was alright to make the connection on Lemmygrad. I told them yes, because in a real setting a sockpuppet would mess up at some point.

I figured at this point the question would be settled, but apparently not! It seems some comrades were still too hesitant to actually point at the alt.

Well, that was about it for the clues I left.

The winners.

And so it’s time to announce the alt. When I made it an account, I took a screenshot divulging the name. So, here it is:

That’s right, the alt is @SyntheticStardust@lemmygrad.ml !

And at that point, I can hear you groan. You were all so close to it, but alas, not close enough.

However, I still have 5 keys to give out. The original winners that I mentioned were SovietSnake and Anna. Both rejected the game (SovietSnake doesn’t play roguelikes, and Anna already has it), and so these keys reenter the pool.

SovietSnake actually snuffed out the alt in mere hours (which made me sweat I’m not gonna lie) but, he told me later, he actually thought he got it wrong when I rejected the allegations with the alt in a reply.

So because we don’t really have winners, I looked through the various posts to find the people that got closest to getting the alt. These are people that, in one way or another, implicated SyntheticStardust. They are :

And then, I want to nominate @commiewolf@lemmygrad.ml as an honorary winner as they were very invested in the hunt, asking questions, regrouping information, etc.

And I think @Zerush@lemmy.ml might have gotten it too, because they made this comment: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/363058 that kinda hints towards it. Well, tell me what you meant by it (no lying).

This might leave me with 1 key left (I sent it to someone and then didn’t receive a word if they activated it or not so I’m putting it back in the pile), which could leave a last winner. I’ll update you if the key works or not and then we’ll figure out how to give it out.

The game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2211110/Brick_Odyssey/. It’s a very good game.

I hope you had fun and we might make it a yearly thing, maybe around April Fool’s day? I might enlist help from the rest of the admins next year to keep the game active next time though.