Comment by ghaff
3 years ago
As you mention on the site, you don't do punctuation. But I'm guessing there are some pretty good fingerprints like:
two spaces after a period
Whether someone uses an em-dash/single hyphen/double hyphens (which may correspond to house style they're used to)
Whether they use semi-colons
(Presumably harder) but consistent substitutions like loose for lose, break for brake, etc.
Use of accents
I manually determined there was an individual posing as two people (playing both the antagonist and the adversary) because they consistently misspelt certain words such as "definitely" as "defiantly".
Fingerprinting certain linguistic traits and mapping that to time-zones as well as confirming there is a partial overlap in posts but never exact worked exceedingly well. Someone can't easily maintain a fluent conversation between themself on two accounts, but they can either get close, either through unnatural delays between sentences or just never interacting with the "other" party at the same time.