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A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

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Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#31

Post by mdoms »

pvg wrote: post #20

The crucial detail that is a little buried in the piece is that the original 'explanation' was posted in /r/ProgrammerHumor so it said right on the tin it was a joke. But the (seemingly clearly intended as a joke) details temporarily nerd-sniped a lot of people's senses of humor right out of their brains. The HN discussion discussion from back then is still fun reading with a number of commenters very invested in the…

I don't think something presented as fact in the comments to a joke is always going to be taken as a joke. Lots of people post their (supposedly) factual war stories in the comments of The Daily WTF and similar websites.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#32

Post by renewiltord »

chrisseaton wrote: post #22
bastawhiz wrote: post #14

This has been a problem for a long time. Almost ten years ago, I maintained a joke Twitter inspired by the Atherton police blotter: @mvpoliceblotter. It was just silly nonsense, until one of the tweets about someone walking into and breaking a store window while watching YouTube on their Google Glass got retweeted by an ABC 7 reporter. SJ Mercury wrote a story (later retracted). It got a ton of attention, even though…

Do you feel responsible for generating misinformation? You say there was zero evidence behind the article, but the evidence was your Tweet, and it was really your Tweet that had zero evidence behind it.

Hmm, it is true. There are many such people spreading misinformation about chickens crossing roads. They have very little evidence for their assertions about said chickens but they state these things with great confidence!

Twitter should crack down on this misinformation.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#34

Post by renewiltord »

pvg wrote: post #24
mjard wrote: post #3

There were lessons to learn here for all the parties involved. The author seems to have chosen to ignore theirs while wanting to pat themselves on the back for fooling news sites. The news sites learned nothing, they got what they wanted out of the deal. Reddit.. Reddit cannot learn, too many people involved.

What lesson is the author supposed to learn here? Don't post jokes on a joke subreddit?

Some people just don’t get jokes. /r/yourjokebutworse has one category but there is also that entire category of comments that go “I hope that’s satire” to what is obviously satirical.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#36

Post by mjard »

pvg wrote: post #24
mjard wrote: post #3

There were lessons to learn here for all the parties involved. The author seems to have chosen to ignore theirs while wanting to pat themselves on the back for fooling news sites. The news sites learned nothing, they got what they wanted out of the deal. Reddit.. Reddit cannot learn, too many people involved.

What lesson is the author supposed to learn here? Don't post jokes on a joke subreddit?

Jokes on the internet are great when people are in on them. Positioning yourself as someone that has inside information when it's false falls closer to "it was just a prank bro". The author should be able to say whatever they want, though the ability doesn't make the action not shitty.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#37

Post by bastawhiz »

chrisseaton wrote: post #30
bastawhiz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. Should The Onion be considered fake news? It was a parody account, which was labeled as such. Journalists who can't even be bothered to tap through to the profile don't get my sympathy.

I kind of think that in the mess we’re in ‘it was just a prank bro’ doesn’t cut it any more as an excuse for something that causes harm. But maybe that’s extremist of me.

So satire cannot exist? Because anyone who might accidentally mistake it for truth can be "harmed"

Journalists have a big megaphone. Their job is to amplify truth. If I'm making jokes and being clear about my intentions, but a lazy journalist sees my content as easy clickbait, that's my fault?

What I was tweeting was never "news" let alone "fake news". It was never wrapped deceptively as truth. It wasn't a prank. Someone else took my words, which were obviously and provably not truth, and held them up under their reputation as an authority of truth. Why should I be responsible for the alleged harm that they caused?

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#38

Post by causality0 »

pvg wrote: post #20

The crucial detail that is a little buried in the piece is that the original 'explanation' was posted in /r/ProgrammerHumor so it said right on the tin it was a joke. But the (seemingly clearly intended as a joke) details temporarily nerd-sniped a lot of people's senses of humor right out of their brains. The HN discussion discussion from back then is still fun reading with a number of commenters very invested in the…

If it was a post in the subreddit that would make sense. But it was a comment, not a post, and thus not labeled as humor.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#39

Post by howenterprisey »

politelemon wrote: post #23
bastawhiz wrote: post #14

This has been a problem for a long time. Almost ten years ago, I maintained a joke Twitter inspired by the Atherton police blotter: @mvpoliceblotter. It was just silly nonsense, until one of the tweets about someone walking into and breaking a store window while watching YouTube on their Google Glass got retweeted by an ABC 7 reporter. SJ Mercury wrote a story (later retracted). It got a ton of attention, even though…

There's a popular myth that Windows 10 was named so because there's tons of proprietary code checking for '95' and '98' by looking for just the '9', and that would have caused applications to break. There was no evidence of this except the Reddit comment by a user pretending to work at MS - their post history very quickly showed that was a lie. But that was taken at face value and it become part of news cycles and ev…

Someone ask Raymond Chen.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#40

Post by pvg »

mdoms wrote: post #31
pvg wrote: post #20

The crucial detail that is a little buried in the piece is that the original 'explanation' was posted in /r/ProgrammerHumor so it said right on the tin it was a joke. But the (seemingly clearly intended as a joke) details temporarily nerd-sniped a lot of people's senses of humor right out of their brains. The HN discussion discussion from back then is still fun reading with a number of commenters very invested in the…

I don't think something presented as fact in the comments to a joke is always going to be taken as a joke. Lots of people post their (supposedly) factual war stories in the comments of The Daily WTF and similar websites.

Right but this is called 'programmer humor'. Plus it's obviously not serious if you think about it for more than 60 seconds.
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