I pick up my cracked guitar with rusty strings and play a riff on it.
OLD VETERAN VOICE
Oh, it happened a long time ago, comrade. And yours truly watched the whole shabang go down.
After we set up this site here in Liberal Mountain, some folks in the discord were already gettin pissy at us about our mods. They stretched the truth for miles in order to find away to call our pioneers reactionary. I assume a few just ranted about it in the early megathreads, but no one remembers any of that.
I play another riff.
That’s when it all began. Some of the assholes decided that if they couldn’t Gish-Gallop us out of the site, they’d make it completely unusable. Fortunately, none of them knew how to hack a server. Instead, they decided to just flood us with that one, dreaded, name…
I have no goddamn clue why anyone thought the Democrat’s guy in ‘04 was so funny. Probably because he was on the right part of that notability to obscurity threshold where all the niche memes come from. I think I saw someone with… his name… as their username on a discord. Was it the Chapo one or was it for an imaginary election server? Still not sure. Not like it matters. Just a day in, we were flooded up to the knees in a name that felt like more and more of a cognitohazard every day.
I play a riff again.
God bless those mods. Probably cleared out thousands of those accounts. Do you really think 20000 people actually post here? Dead wrong. About ten percent at least was from the spamraid alone, if memory serves me right.
After a week of reporting those god damned pests, we finally went back to normal. Pretty sure we got into the tussle over outdoor cats around then. It’s been years, I ain’t too sure. Every day, though- I’ve gotta remember what those wreckers did to this place. Took an infant, didn’t have the guts to injure it, and just flipped said infant off for a while.
Sometimes, when it’s summer, and the sun heats up the gunk underneath the roads, you can still smell the scent of Massachusetts Senators.
I think I saw someone with… his name… as their username on a discord. Was it the Chapo one or was it for an imaginary election server?
The original John Kerry was a powerposter on Discord who was pissed when he tried to force spamming John Kerry’s name into being a meme and no one thought it was funny after like a day. He got banned and at some point made contact with several other banned Discord powerposters, at which point many of them adopted the bit. Before long, people who were hostile to the Chapo diaspora in general were setting their profile pictures to John Kerry and DMing folks who were mods here. I wouldn’t be surprised if some keeweepharms and coomtown folks picked up on it as well.
Attacks would come in waves. They’d make a plan, execute, then regroup. So each round of sock puppets and manufactured drama would be followed up with Kerry spam when something failed or fizzled out. There’s a reason that Hexbear still has more extensive mod tools than Lemmy.
Probably cleared out thousands of those accounts.
RIP @1000BannedKerryAccts (yes this one was one of the OGs)
Edit: Unless someone has backups, this Death Grips Kerry video from August 2020 is the only Kerryganda video left in existence.
Edit 2: One of the wrecker Discords was named Chapo Gulag House. It had a category named “CHAPO OPERATIONS” with channel names like #war-room, #clean-chapochat-alts, #laboratory, #username-ideas, and #communist-waifubot
Edit 3: Found this gem in my archive folder with a .txt file next it by the same name. The file’s contents read:
a mod posted this to a public channel in element and then freaked out. they acted like this was some big secret and deleted it and all the messages acknowledging it. i have no idea why this picture is important but this was hilarious. i am high as shit so hopefully this makes sense in the morning
Yeah it was created within a context of trying to destroy the site, but without that context it’s pretty funny. These are people who ostensibly used to post on r/CTH
Its the most terminally online posterbrained video ive seen in a while. These people have never even thought of the concept of grass, never mind touched it.
I thought it was started by what was her name? Zarathustra or something like that, and her sympathizers/followers over some discord moderation drama, and then it just turned into a weird meme that raiders use in the same way 4chan raiders always fall back on the same traditional raider memes.
Or am I just conflating two separate hostile groups because they were both ongoing issues at the same time?
Zara was at the core of a lot of it, yeah. I don’t know the order of events. The answer to that is probably lost in forgotten or deleted Discords somewhere. I do have another text file full of Discord IDs but I don’t know if I should post those.
That does bring back memories, but the funniest chapter in this site's history will always be the guy who lost his shit over pumpkin spice, got banned, and proceeded to spam the site with dozens of accounts with Flintstones-themed names
ohh shit im remembering this now, who was that again?? lmao
Trust me, I am NOT that guy. I named by account this for laughs.
The fun part about kerryposting is we can't talk about kerryposting because any explanation about it might cause a copycat and literally nobody wants that.
If someone engages in high-effort Kerryposting, isn't that just regular posting at that point?
See, that’s the thing. Allowing kerryposting as a bit is a gateway to inviting unironic kerryposting. It’s happened before and it could happen again.
I remember back when it was happening, but I had absolutely no fuckin clue whatsoever as to why. I think it's similar, or related to the "shork" wars, in some respect though.
Well this site started as a life raft when the largest left wing sub on Reddit was getting banned, and while it was being developed we were all hanging out in a discord server. There were a ton of people in the server compared to here, so when the actual site launched some people got upset about who the mods or admins were and how they were running the site, so they basically got obsessed with ruining the site by spamming it with dumb posts. Idk why they chose John Kerry I think it was just a random thing. Basic subreddit drama type stuff
it might cause a copycat and literally nobody wants that.
what's the big deal
Back in the early days of c*apo.chat (now hexbear) there was a group of wreckers from the c*apo discord who spammed images and texts about said presidential hopeful as an attempt to troll. Why John Kerry I have no goddamned clue and it didn't do much of anything outside annoy people and make a mess for mods to clean up.
:screm: chapochat, I am a chapochatter !
:mao-clap: :xi-clap: :ortega-clap:
the two weeks where people tried to make chacha happen was the highpoint for cringe on this website
the two weeks where people tried to make chacha happen was the highpoint
for cringeon this websiteFixed it for you:penguin-love:
The only thing more cringe than calling it cha-cha would be basing the site's name off of some obscure meme that was posted on the sub like two times before it got banned.
Chapo dot chat? never heard of it. i only believe in hereshowberniecanstill.win :angery:
The fun day was when we realized you could look up your user ID to see what place in line you were.
#44 here
On the "Send Message" page: https://hexbear.net/create_private_message?recipient_id=1008
You are 1008
'Cause I'm John Kerry, yes I'm the real Kerry
All you other John Kerrys are just imitating
So won't the real John Kerry please stand up
Please stand up, please stand up?
It was apparently people spamming things about John Kerry, who was the democratic candidate for the 2004 presidential election (I think). There is actually a local Labor politician that lives 3 doors down from me (well, used to) called John Kerry who is trying to get a new homeless shelter built here, but the local city council is blocking the state government. Apparently these are not the same people.
They didn't really post about John Kerry. Mostly they did spam posts of photos of John Kerry and made comments that consisted of nothing but his name repeated over and over so the comment took up a huge amount of the page.
I'm sure it sucked for the mods at the time, but it was (and still is) pretty funny to me that this was our big issue, that people wouldn't stop posting this loser's face all the time.
