My interest in reddit faded when someone posted a link to 4chan and, and I looked at it pretty disgusted at who would make a site dedicated to obviously fake, often offensive garbage.
Then I saw their disclaimer, "The stories and information here are artistic work of fiction and falsehood. only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
It seems like a dumb way to come to this realization but after turning this statement over in my head for a few weeks, it dawned on me that all the quirky stories I've been reading on reddit for years, even the believable ones, are fake. Part of this realization was actually posting a number of fake stories and getting some very highly upvoted comments.
That many people, journalists especially, seem to read twitter content with a default-true instead of a defaul-false assumption is scary to me.
Then I saw their disclaimer, "The stories and information here are artistic work of fiction and falsehood. only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
It seems like a dumb way to come to this realization but after turning this statement over in my head for a few weeks, it dawned on me that all the quirky stories I've been reading on reddit for years, even the believable ones, are fake. Part of this realization was actually posting a number of fake stories and getting some very highly upvoted comments.
That many people, journalists especially, seem to read twitter content with a default-true instead of a defaul-false assumption is scary to me.