A copycat spammer started sending gore pictures to people using the same Nicole copypasta text. A lot of people got upset and there was a flurry of discussion over like a 24h period. Some people seemed to think it was a serial killer and Nicole had been doxxed and killed. In reality if I recall right the picture was from a morgue somewhere in China.

Anyway the whole thing led to a general "okay maybe the joke has run its course and we shouldn't encourage this" type of moment and the sub was shut down. Presumably the spammer stopped spamming once they no longer received attention, but maybe the admins found and IP banned them or something. I have no idea.

[–] Triumph@fedia.io 19 points 3 days ago (1 children)

"The" admins? All that spam was coming from new accounts made at instances with little oversight.

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 19 points 3 days ago

It was probably poorly phrased but I feel like I remember there was a group of various instance admins at the time discussing ways to deal with it, so it was more of a reference to maybe they figured something out.

You're right that they used tiny instances with no oversight and open registrations to ban evade for a long time even before this debacle when it was just normal Nicole spam.