This thread hasn't been posted in awhile, which is a shame because recently I've noticed something of a gimmick account conspiracy going on. I don't have a ton of evidence, but I've been following Gimmick Accounts Being Sellouts on Twitter. What I'm pretty sure was initially meant to mock people hocking little vibrators on twitter is becoming a strange collection of evidence a bunch of major gimmick accounts have become connected.
I want to say this started about a 2-3 weeks ago, but it may have been longer. Essentially, several large gimmick accounts are all promoting the same t-shirts, in the same way, with the same store link called 'anyimage.io'. Gimmick accounts I've noticed engaging in this behavior include: pics that go hard, good reddit, Hating with Context, Posts to Show a Small Victorian Child, iconic audio origins, these memes will intimidate you, and I'm sure many more. The shirt designs are often bizarre, nonsensical 'shitpost' designs, most of which I think I saw on tumblr years ago in some form or another. Here's a couple of examples.
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Like I said, I saw most of these in some iteration on tumblr years ago - instead of just promoting a product, they are selling cheap bootlegs of other artists stolen designs on the internet. Some of them started replying to their posts with 'only original link', while others just hide the origin of the images/designs even if the original artist is still selling them.
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In this particular case, OP appears to be okay with people using their art since they essentially cleaned and edited a vector on old licensed merchandise for fun. Which makes it even weirder, really, because they shouldn't have anything to hide. These accounts really don't want you to notice they didn't make these designs.
I haven't really noticed anyone point it out, but the fact they all started doing this at the exact same time, with the same designs, and the same strategies, makes me think there's some corpo out there that bought up all these accounts and is trying to run them simultaneously without being detected.
Gimmick accounts OOC also pointed out this gimmick account created in January 2022, capitalizing off of a meme that went viral in the last 2 weeks, exists, and already has 50k followers.
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Buying followers, perhaps? It's an interesting development and I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone more seriously documenting it. I hope necroing this thread will bring more attention to it.
EDIT UPDATE: Found confirmation from the maker of Posts to Show to a Small Victorian Child. They sold the account for $300.
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