Classic! I remember convincing friends and family members that this was real when I was young. There was something incredibly fun and powerful being a child and able to fool adults who would believe anything they read on the internet. It's amazing how websites like this inoculated myself and many other young people from obvious misinformation on the internet in a fun and mostly harmless way
The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
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Re: The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
#12It's always crazy running in to one hiking up there
Re: The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
#13My uncles spent a summer working tours near Aspen in the 80s. They worked tirelessly to educate the tourist population about the dangers of the Rocky Mountain Alpine Shark.
Re: The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
#14I asked ChatGPT if octopuses exist in trees, and to my surprise, ChatGPT 'got it'
Re: The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
#15Early ancestors of the Squibbon.
Re: The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
#16The context of this showing up on HN made me kinda assumed it was a chatgpt generated thing.
A quick google shows it seems to be a well known classic hoax from the late 90s.
But there really are crabs and lobsters that live in trees and things, as do lots of type of mollusc (eg slugs and snails). So it isn’t completely silly.
So it’s not like a tree octopus is any more ridiculous than the coconut crab?
It seems there is no good way to know the truth anymore, as searching the internet might just find collaborating lies and conjecture…
Re: The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
#17Reminds me of the endangered "Australian Drop bear".
Re: The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
#18I don't mean to spoil the fun, downvote me if this is not in the spirit, but it took me way too long to figure this out and others may be as slow as me and save some time by reading this comment: > The Pacific Northwest tree octopus is an Internet hoax created in 1998 by a humor writer under the pseudonym Lyle Zapato. Since its creation, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus website has been commonly referenced in Inter…
> I don't mean to spoil the fun, downvote me if this is not in the spirit, but it took me way too long to figure this out and others may be as slow as me and save some time by reading this comment:
I believed it too. The thing is, this is something no one is really incentivized to lie about. If some website says "politician did X", then your lie detector turns on, because it's worth it for lots of websites to lie or mislead about that. It would be very hard to go through life questioning the veracity of every inconsequential bit of information that no one has an incentive to lie about. I don't think it demonstrates much that students believed it. And I especially don't think it means anything about gullibility about information found online. Almost certainly, if it were printed in a book, they'd be even more likely to believe it.
Re: The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
#19Didn't know it was a hoax. This is the Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_tree_octopus
Re: The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
#20Its a two hour drive from Microsoft headquarters, the perfect location to search for gullible Microsoft employees looking for this octopus, as they would become useful assets for the intelligence community. Think like a spook!