Celebrity status on Steamgifts.

Maybe because such actors use all angles in a room when acting.

Well, because unlike shit like Picasso or Da Vinci, porn is actually high art, not that pathetic mess that other artists do.

You see all the angles of the hot dog and its bun.

i guess sports also do (football, motorsport), at least for broadcast, not sure if related with your question about recordings

This is all just support's laziness. They don't want to deal with the tickets from the idiots who take these jokes seriously, so their solution is to not allow the jokes at all.

Their goal is not to make this community a better place (the jokes actually contribute to that), their goal is to make their job easier.

In all honesty, I get the premium account thing. You might not know the site and it might be confusing. Fair enough, right? Some sites have subscription models and premium services and this wouldn't be anything new.
But it's a whole other thing to see an account's name, them saying everything in the most exaggerated way possible, claiming to be someone else and then giving a ridiculous threat about something that can't be threatened over, all to an account that isn't new to the site or anything. Plus, the link leads to the new giveaway page. If anything, it'd inspire a giveaway or two just for the joke of it.

This just disrupts the community and the rules are too arbitrary to follow. This goes beyond common sense at some points. I don't dislike the rulemakers or the enforcers, but I do dislike that they blindly follow the rules and don't actually make decisions based on the context.

Your suspension sounds like yet another case of power-hunger by mods. It's unfortunate what SG has become...

This makes more sense, but it's also quite contradictory to the original post.

Zeruel132 didn't break any rules.

Fair enough, but you did essentially give me a warning. I hope you understand that you're in a position of power and so, your choice of words has a different meaning to a regular user. So, if a friend says "I'm giving you a warning", you know that it's informal. When a cop says "I'm giving you a warning", you'd assume it to be a formal warning and essentially be a punishment for doing something that's not allowed, breaking the rules.

If he had actually done any of the things I listed, I would have suspended him and we would not be having this conversation.

Just to let you know, that doesn't seem to be normal protocol then as I've seen people be warned before getting suspended before for issues similar or even same as mine. If I'm correct then I've even seen you do it. It's fine that you do and that you actually give people a chance before punishing them. It's just that this doesn't seem to line up.

These are all extremely sensitive topics on the site and should be treated as such. /.../ To use a parallel in real life, you can make jokes about bombs in an airport, but it is still not wise to do so.

That is false. Maybe it's true in the circle of staff, but it's not in the public. An example of where impersonation would be a taboo subject and making a joke about it would be inappropriate would be the trade forums, where it does matter. Taboos tend to come from a type of danger or disdain for something in specific. For example, on SG, the more common taboos would be regifting, not activating wins, using bots and "leeching". There are also social stigmas that this community as a separate social ecosystem has had at some point or another. Like making political posts or asking simple questions that can be answered by the FAQ. These are examples of sensitive topics.
Impersonation, solicitation and misrepresenting rules are not taboo because they don't affect us. The system in place basically voids impersonation, solicitation always requires the victim to voluntarily give something away and misrepresenting the rules isn't an issue because we have the guidelines and the FAQ which cover most of the basics.
Maybe you can prove me wrong by people getting angry at someone even mentioning impersonation on SG in specific or threads being made about someone begging for a game on the forum. If it truly is a sensitive subject like you claim it to be, then the community's reaction to these things would be according to the offense. I personally, have not seen any. Maybe one or two, but that's from my tens of months on this site, it'd be weird if no one reacted negatively.

My initial response was not only for the benefit of Zeruel132, but also to make it clear to anyone who either a) took it seriously

Fair enough. It's hard to prove either way, so I'll concede and say that there really are so many dummies that can't read usernames, get confused by exaggerations and can't figure out what the "new giveaway" tab is.

In this way, I warn Zeruel132 that there are people out there who are too dense to pick up on his included "obviousness and insanity" while also discouraging the trolls from taking his example a step further and then claiming "it was OK when he did it."

It's like the site The Onion and the subreddit r/AteTheOnion. Basically a satirical news site that now has a subreddit dedicated to people who believed what they spewed and now believe their jokes to be real. And if you actually look at them, you see that they do exist and they're essentially the same people that you are trying to protect. And it should show that at some point your gains are outweighed by the losses. Yes, you might help a confused dummy, but at the same time you confuse a few users, make some over time dislike you and unlikely to co-operate with you and more likely to break site's rules, which'll create more issues for you. These are the people that can't be helped. If we did account for them, then single sentence comments would turn into paragraphs which would basically nip all the confusions in the bud before they even emerge. Sure, it'll be good for them, but it's unreasonable. So, we either ruin our own jokes by pointing them out, which usually ruins them and add all ways to remove confusion to almost any post. Or we just live and let live for the most part. Only intervene with something like that if it's genuinely confusing.

I'm glad you're down with using this as an example on a future thread. I'll try and think of how to make that thread in the meanwhile :)

1. It's not beside the point, it's precisely the point. Your warning is completely uncalled for. It disrupts the joke and essentially kills it.
2. Your parallel is not even remotely equivalent. By making a joke about a bomb in an airpot, there's a serious possibility of threat at hand. If there's indeed a bomb, and security washes it off as a joke and doesn't look into it, hundreds of lives can be lost. But the joke we're talking about here is completely harmless. What is the worse that could happen if someone believed the joke? They would make giveaways in the site. Is that not a good thing?
3. It's more likely that a troll will take it a step further only now that you've brought awareness to the comment. If you had left it alone like it was intended to be, it would most likely not have gotten as much attention. This is just too much. You should not buzzkill jokes just for the sake of preventing other users from breaking the rules. Let them break the rules if they're too dense to get the joke, it's your job to suspend them.

Lol, I knew there would be someone saying this.

It doesn't matter if I was funny to you or not. What matters is what actually happened. If something like this is so hard to understand for you, then it'll be best that you learn from life before talking about stuff like this. You're seeing this at the most shallow level possible and while it's still valid criticism, it'll be based on insights that a egocentric aged children can make.

I didn't walk any policy infringement tightrope. I made a joke that touched on the perceived heavyhandedness of the authority of the site, the community members that demand gifts at a rapid rate, the blatant mockery of impersonators and that was all with a tinge of exaggeration.

And just so you know, not all comedy has to be funny. Many jokes rely on relatability and social commentary. :D

Still, we are not responsible for the ignorance of other people. If someone doesn't know English well enough to detect a joke or sarcasm, that's their problem. We should not be held accountable for it. Let them face the consequences, who cares if they will be slapped with a suspension? That's what support is for. You can try to prevent rule breaks from happening, but not by punishing people who are not breaking any rules because they could be inspiring people to break rules. That's just wrong. That's like blaming TV and video games for mass shootings.

I personally don't see a single problem with allowing people to beg for games at all, but since the rule of the site is to not beg for games, I see a big difference between that and begging for giveaways. Your example is very specific, but what if someone made a thread begging people to make a public level 0 giveaway for a game? Their chances of winning such giveaway would be very low. So even though they would be indirectly begging for a game, their chances of getting that game would be almost impossible, so they wouldn't really be begging for it, they would be begging for a chance to get it.

And really? The price of the game has influence over the begging? So if I beg someone to give me a free game, that's ok?