I've come accross many posts from this subreddit that hit the front page. Let's just say I hope reddit is keeping an eye on foreign and domestic troll farms as many of the most popular posts seem suspiciously like fiction to me...
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29867733.
Sorry, just excercising a safe amount of scepticism with regards to social media.
What a stupid post. If your first reaction to someone questioning a broad social movement in 2022 as a conspiracy theory is to go directly into a deeper conspiracy theory then it's pretty likely you've already made up your mind about the underlying topic and aren't approaching the discussion in good faith anymore.
Edit: this is especially true after watching 4 years of the federal government waging an internal war between two factions about how much "influence" a foreign power had over our social media and elections.
I don't think someone who puts this in their bio is qualified to make that comment:
> One of my favorite low key social engineering hacks is that I used to have a keylogger installed on every machine I own. Whenever a friend needs to hop on my machine to show me something, they'd log into an account they own and I would have their password.
You're lucky that not many people will tell you exactly what they think of that, thanks to HN guidelines.
shalmanese 1 hour ago | undown | parent | flag | favorite | on: Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without he...
One of my favorite low key social engineering hacks is that I used to have a keylogger installed on every machine I own. Whenever a friend needs to hop on my machine to show me something, they'd log into an account they own and I would have their password.
Then I'd do the same Luigi-like low key messing with them for a while. My favorite was when a friend had a VNC server running on their machine with control capabilities. I would sit next to them and subtly jerk the mouse pointer right before they were about to click on something and it drove them mad for a good 20 minutes before I couldn't hold onto the giggles anymore.
edit: To add a bit of context, this was in the Windows 98 era, before the age of social media where we started putting all of our secrets onto our machines. And it was among a group of friends where everyone was trying to hack everyone else and pretty much anything was considered fair game. All of us were high school kids so there wasn't some super serious reputation we had to protect.
From where I'm standing, the stupidity that stands out is how some people are desperately trying to gaslight themselves and everyone around them by trying to depict people chatting about workplace abuse as being something outlandish and utterly inconceivable.
I happen to stumble upon posts from /r/antiwork and I have to say that personally I had the misfortune of experiencing far worse than what's reported there on any random day, and in western European countries where workers rights actually exist and are enforced.
I don't know if they try and add these things to their portfolio, but it definitely makes a perverse sense, ie 'look my writing even fooled X people on reddit!'
Honestly I believe nothing anymore without some digging, and really it's something that's gotten worse as every year I feel like we are living in a world of lies- politics, ads, fucking everything.
Now, I do honestly believe there are many people that are legitimately unhappy and venting in that sub- I know more than a few people in real life living out some of those stories.
Just...use critical thinking skills. And try not to let it kill you inside. I am become jaded and cynical, but because I'm a realist.
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/s0auu4/apartme...
If these repeated posts about the same tedious things are grist for creative writing classes there are some really realistic sounding, terrible writers out there.
It sounds like you might be extrapolating from one or two pieces of spurious anecdata.
So what exactly seems inauthentic about the top story on the forum? Who would make that up and why?
"It's the internet lol everything is made up" is, frankly, a bit edgelord as a rationale.
If you want made up look at the vote counts for any picture with a coke bottle or a UPS truck in it.
Coz Im struggling to see how you could believe that the 99% of overwhelmingly mundane stories about e.g. giving notice or how to deal with health and safety issues at work would become grist for creative writing.
It makes zero sense.
Yes, the boring posts are probably real and I never claimed otherwise. But the posts people remember and engage with are not the boring posts and have a much more mixed track record. There have been cases both of "someone creates updates with an impossible resolution/schedule", "post describing the opposite point of view of a recently popular post comes up" and "post touching on hot-button internet arguments". You can argue that only the first category must be a fake, but the rest pop up with a suspicious frequency.
Similarly, you could see a big jump in the number of legal issues relating to whatever excited bestoflegaladvice recently. It doesn't seem likely that there's a sudden uptick in the number of people who have neighbors cut down their trees, or who have a landlocked property.
Reddit opinions/posts tend to be predictable enough and most users don't notice the repetitive comments, or just don't care.
source?