In case anyone is wondering, the term for a person like QS who ignores social norms and believes he is always in the right is "psychopath".
It's been my unfortunate reality that I've had to experience this very closely over the past 5 or 6 months. I think you can see this again and again if you look at how his reasoning works and his behavior. Even now, he seems to think that the only way I could have discovered his alt is through some secret tip from an unknown newbie account---I have no idea how he's convinced himself of this. I find it very strange how little he seems to be able to put himself into anyone else's shoes. Why didn't he realize how obvious it would be to bring in a sockpuppet account into a thread and repeat the exact same things as the Quickseler account? You'll note that he continues to suggest that nothing was wrong with his escrow scam because in the "<1% of the cases" where there was a dispute he just "handled it fairly". He seems unable to comprehend that it's impossible to claim that you're being fair if you're both the judge and the appelant.
I think he's also making it apparant just how unstable he is. He goes from chest-thumping (I have other accounts on DT, I will have you removed if you cross me; I'll sue you for libel), to distractions (but tsp is not cool; Vod is an horse's arse), to these incomprehensible justifications (I did nothing wrong, I will never do anything wrong), and then repeats. These are the same strategies he used in his "argumentation" against me why I asked him to justify his abusive behavior. The only difference is that he seems to have finally stopped pulling in the sockpuppets (ostensibly). Obviously these kinds of behaviors are disturbing, and I certainly think that the community here is better off for having seen them first hand, but I actually think there's a bigger lesson to be learned here.
QS made a meal-and-a-half out of quick neg-reps, snap-decisions, and never looking back. He did this to my account. I definitely saw him do this to at least a couple of other people. In each case, because QS was respected, people either wouldn't our couldn't cross him. He'd follow up with posts about how he's doing a great job and that's why he's right, and in the echo-chamber of an internet forum, it because a kind of self-fulfiling prophecy. QS' reputation continued to be built on the backs of the accounts he neg-repped. I know that after I had seen him extrapolate wildly about my own case into a kind of stupor about what he "knows without taking any word from TF", I started to look twice at those untrusted negative feedbacks in his trust page: people that pointed out that he was abusing them, people who called him out for over-obsessing about blockchain "evidence" which could be explained otherwise, people who said he didn't know anything about the situation but had somehow appointed himself judge and left neg reptuation on one or the other party. Quickseller's inability to put himself into other people's shoes makes him a particularly poor judge, but the real question to me is why so many people blithely followed his self-aggrandizing manouvers. Why was it the case that you had to actually get falsely neg-repped by Quickseller in order to take a close look at his way of being?
1) I think the lesson to be learned here is twofold: when a reasonable explanation exists for some behavior, people should be given the benefit of the doubt. I don't think this guilty-until-proven-innocent M.O of QS and alts is helpful. I think it creates a stifling culture of fear.
2) I think people need to take a close look at mob-mentalities and to check into facts for themselves. So many people around here traffic in reputations, but reputations are merely histories. Each new case has facts, and facts can be examined and each person needs to do this for themself, not to rely on the pronouncments from the mighty Quickseller or the Almighty dooglus, or the Great Vod, or the God Theymos or any other such figure.
I also have argued in the past for more decentralization of the trust network, I think it would do a great deal to alleviate the kinds of reputation trafficking abuses that we see Quickseller epitomizing. I think talking about that too much here would afield of the main topic. But I hope that people will think a bit about what the Quickseller lesson teaches us about what kind of culture we should seek to establish on this forum. And what kind of culture leads to toxic schemes and nastiness.
Just my 2 (or 3) satoshis.
--TSP
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