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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

It’s been entirely fictional for its whole history but people used to have to come up with their made up stories themselves.

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I’ve always wondered how many of the AITA-type posts are writers for TV seeing which stories get natural traction.

during covid i would post all sorts of made-up stories in r/relationship_advice just out of boredom/for the fun of creative writing. once the post stopped getting comments, i’d delete it/my comment history and write another one. i got quite a lot of karma, some awards, and a real dislike for the term “red flag” after ~six months of this

Not something most would brag about, especially in a tgread about inauthentic posts on subreddits being unethical.

That isn't bragging, its just their experience.

Sounds very similar to an inauthentic post itself in how it presents an appropriate background. (I think it's real, but we have to question now.)

i didn’t mean to sound like i was bragging. the comment i was replying to was wondering if people make posts that are essentially creative writing exercises, and i was simply saying that, yeah, people (me in this case) definitely do that

Fair enough.

Why not?

I wonder if this real life story (the one about posting fake real life stories on r/relationship_advice) is real or fake.

Buzzfeed posting questions on /r/AskReddit for article content is a longstanding meme, so I wouldn't be surprised if other folks were pulling similar shenanigans.

Social media in general (including HN) is heavily fictional and somewhat deluded compared to reality.

Case in point just the last month: All of social media hated Nintendo’s pricing. Reddit called for boycotts. Nintendo’s live streams had “drop the price” screamed in the chat for the entire duration. YouTube videos complaining hit 1M+ views. Even HN spread misinformation and complained.

The preorders broke Best Buy, Target, and Walmart; and it’s now on track to be the largest opening week for a console, from any manufacturer, ever. To the point it probably outsold the Steam Deck’s lifetime sales in the first day.

People being mad they have to pay more is not fiction, that's reality. Even if they suck it up and pay

I had a friend group that played FIFA and similarly predatory cash and timesink games and complained endlessly about them but also purchased the same garbage annually, investing extra money on top to get ahead. Thousands of pounds a year. I checked in with a couple of them last month and it appears that nothing has changed. Nearly twenty years of angrily and knowingly wasting money yet somehow unable to stop. I see the same thing in people watching Star Wars Episode 35, despite episodes 1,2,3,6-34.

Sounds like... addiction...

Which yes, they had a choice but certainly we shouldn't enable the pushers and if they had a choice in the beginning it is questionable if they do now (by nature of addiction)

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