A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle(kiwiziti.com)
kiwiziti.com
A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
https://kiwiziti.com/~matt/timberlake/
176 comments
Just looked into this and yeah, the original post to which the comment was responding was a programmer humor post. However, it looked as if the comment in question may have been an actual, legit attempt to explain the phenomenon. I don't think it's obvious or assumed that the comments responding to programmer humor posts are always intended to be jokes as well.
I'm also just asking myself what's more likely here. Think of the demographic of that forum. It seems to me like some up and coming nerd kid fancied themself an expert and cooked up a half baked theory about what was happening.
I'm also just asking myself what's more likely here. Think of the demographic of that forum. It seems to me like some up and coming nerd kid fancied themself an expert and cooked up a half baked theory about what was happening.
Yeah it's totally plausible that someone would reply with genuine facts about a humourous situation.
Still, one should do extra double checking before taking anything there literally.
Still, one should do extra double checking before taking anything there literally.
I think a little overconfident trolling is a vital experience to have this day and age.
Once you see dozens or more people jump on a made-up bandwagon you're a little bit better prepared and alert for the cumulative stupidity we collectively produce.
Once you see dozens or more people jump on a made-up bandwagon you're a little bit better prepared and alert for the cumulative stupidity we collectively produce.
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.
>Lots of people post their (supposedly) factual war stories in the comments of The Daily WTF [...] //
I've always assumed they're apocryphal, ie based on the truth but considerably dramatised to be more "Daily WTF" material, somewhat like The Onion articles. Basically, if your best source is an internet comment in a joke-y forum, just like if your best source is "Rob from accounts said at the water-cooler", then some corroboration before you promulgate that information would be absolutely in order.
I've always assumed they're apocryphal, ie based on the truth but considerably dramatised to be more "Daily WTF" material, somewhat like The Onion articles. Basically, if your best source is an internet comment in a joke-y forum, just like if your best source is "Rob from accounts said at the water-cooler", then some corroboration before you promulgate that information would be absolutely in order.
I don't think something presented by a clown dressed up like a ballerina is always going to be taken as a joke. If you based a actual news story around an anonymous DailyWTF comment, that would be strange.
Right but this is called 'programmer humor'. Plus it's obviously not serious if you think about it for more than 60 seconds.
I just took a very quick look at the subreddit (absolutely awful stuff BTW, who finds this crap funny?) and already found 2 instances of people sharing "real" stories in the comments to joke posts. Should both of these be taken as jokes? They are not presented as such.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0elnq/com...
> I completely forget the example problem we were doing, but back when I was learning C, we were given sample code to fix. Everything was perfectly formatted, and the program ran without issue like be 99% of the time, but every once in a while, it’d give a totally incorrect value, or throw an error, and it was to teach us all about concurrency and race conditions and how even when we know we have done everything right, there might be something wrong that takes a deeper understanding to idntify. My professor was awesome.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0ibli/com...
> In my old team, every line above 400 was considered an error. 2000 lines was a cause to put the development on hold until the end of refactoring.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0elnq/com...
> I completely forget the example problem we were doing, but back when I was learning C, we were given sample code to fix. Everything was perfectly formatted, and the program ran without issue like be 99% of the time, but every once in a while, it’d give a totally incorrect value, or throw an error, and it was to teach us all about concurrency and race conditions and how even when we know we have done everything right, there might be something wrong that takes a deeper understanding to idntify. My professor was awesome.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0ibli/com...
> In my old team, every line above 400 was considered an error. 2000 lines was a cause to put the development on hold until the end of refactoring.
The point isn't that there aren't 'real' stories. It's that it makes a lot of sense to evaluate it as a joke, given that it's in a joke forum. And when you do that, it's not that hard to tell it's a joke or at least suspect that it is as likely to be a joke as anything else.
> who finds this crap funny?
Apparently 1.9 million people (the number of subscribers).
Apparently 1.9 million people (the number of subscribers).
The quality went way down after most of them joined.
The second one is quite obviously a joke.
It is a bit Poe's law really. There are plenty of companies with dumb software policies and practices, cargo culting legitimate approaches by treating them as axioms.
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.
I don't think that's how joke forums work, really.
/r/programmerhumor will ban you if you post a joke in the comments. All jokes must be top level posts.
Do not threaten Happy Fun Ball.
The subreddit has 'Humor' in the name, not 'Joke'.
So to me it is not obvious it is a joke because programmers can also laugh at very silly real world bugs.
But the main story here is that news outlets don't bother to fact check. And that's another reason you should avoid news.
So to me it is not obvious it is a joke because programmers can also laugh at very silly real world bugs.
But the main story here is that news outlets don't bother to fact check. And that's another reason you should avoid news.
The subreddit has 'Humor' in the name, not 'Joke'.
At that point it's probably best to avoid human language altogether
At that point it's probably best to avoid human language altogether
In defense of the gullible, I have a hard time telling the difference between reality and a prank these days too.
I think misreading something like this is a perfectly understandable thing. It's definitely a 'had me going there for a second' type of joke. The unusual thing about this one is its spread and the (seemingly ongoing!) insistence by some of the taken that it was diabolically difficult to tell it was a joke. I suppose the latter contributed to the former.
Truth and fiction are indistinguishable on social media. The medium itself encourages this. Falsehood is built-in and inseparable.
Of course "journalists" sometimes spread "stories" based on random social media posts. What is really interesting is that the posts were there first, and the internet amplifies them on its own.
To any reader who's not in on it, the original comment about the Roku crashes sounds plausible enough by itself. It is then upvoted organically to a broader audience.
The author didn't write misinformation for ad views, sponsorships, or even Reddit karma. He just released it for his own pleasure, as an "obvious" joke.
Millions of similarly motivated posts are being blasted out every minute, with content such as: memes with humorous but false descriptions of the content, selfies painting false pictures of people's lives, anecdotes with implied messages, creative writing of what-if scenarios or "head canon", compelling but baseless theories about complex topics, true statements cherry-picked to make false points, etc.
These are created not for sales, propaganda, or even internet points, but simply to share half-formed idle thoughts. That is: jokes, guesses, hot takes, wishful fantasy.
It may be obvious bullshit to the authors, but the medium presents it all as fact. None of us are capable of passing careful judgement on the sheer volume of content, so most is absorbed at face value.
This environment is also a fertile breeding ground for deliberate, malicious misinformation, but that's beside the point.
Ultimately, the only solutions are to stop consuming social media altogether, or accept that falsehood is now inseparable from actual facts.
Of course "journalists" sometimes spread "stories" based on random social media posts. What is really interesting is that the posts were there first, and the internet amplifies them on its own.
To any reader who's not in on it, the original comment about the Roku crashes sounds plausible enough by itself. It is then upvoted organically to a broader audience.
The author didn't write misinformation for ad views, sponsorships, or even Reddit karma. He just released it for his own pleasure, as an "obvious" joke.
Millions of similarly motivated posts are being blasted out every minute, with content such as: memes with humorous but false descriptions of the content, selfies painting false pictures of people's lives, anecdotes with implied messages, creative writing of what-if scenarios or "head canon", compelling but baseless theories about complex topics, true statements cherry-picked to make false points, etc.
These are created not for sales, propaganda, or even internet points, but simply to share half-formed idle thoughts. That is: jokes, guesses, hot takes, wishful fantasy.
It may be obvious bullshit to the authors, but the medium presents it all as fact. None of us are capable of passing careful judgement on the sheer volume of content, so most is absorbed at face value.
This environment is also a fertile breeding ground for deliberate, malicious misinformation, but that's beside the point.
Ultimately, the only solutions are to stop consuming social media altogether, or accept that falsehood is now inseparable from actual facts.
While social media has caused muxh more people to spread misinformation farther and faster, more traditional mediums aren't free from misinformation.
Your solution of stopping to consume social media doesn't work, as other mediums have been just as bad at being unbiased truthseekers.
Your solution of stopping to consume social media doesn't work, as other mediums have been just as bad at being unbiased truthseekers.
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 your can't even watch YouTube on a Google Glass. There was no broken window. The was zero evidence except for two sentences on Twitter. Nobody did any fact checking whatsoever.
It's not a new problem, but it definitely feels like it's gotten worse.
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 your can't even watch YouTube on a Google Glass. There was no broken window. The was zero evidence except for two sentences on Twitter. Nobody did any fact checking whatsoever.
It's not a new problem, but it definitely feels like it's gotten worse.
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 eventually a commonly repeated statement.
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 eventually a commonly repeated statement.
Another similar one was the "Nuclear Gandhi" thing[1]. Just believable enough for programmers to think it must be true.
My theory on Windows 10 would be wanting version number parity with Mac OS. Don't make a news story out of this though. Evidence:
- Microsoft did the same thing with the Xbox 360 instead of calling it Xbox 2. "360" cleverly aligned it with both competing consoles of the same generation, the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution (later renamed the Wii).
- Microsoft implied that they might stay on Windows 10 indefinitely[2]. Who wants to be forever one version behind the competition?
- After Mac OS bumped their version version up to 11, Microsoft abandoned the above and went to 11 as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
[2] https://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/mi...
My theory on Windows 10 would be wanting version number parity with Mac OS. Don't make a news story out of this though. Evidence:
- Microsoft did the same thing with the Xbox 360 instead of calling it Xbox 2. "360" cleverly aligned it with both competing consoles of the same generation, the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution (later renamed the Wii).
- Microsoft implied that they might stay on Windows 10 indefinitely[2]. Who wants to be forever one version behind the competition?
- After Mac OS bumped their version version up to 11, Microsoft abandoned the above and went to 11 as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
[2] https://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/mi...
> Microsoft implied that they might stay on Windows 10 indefinitely[2].
Sure, "implied" in the sense that the article quotes a spokesman saying "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows".
Sure, "implied" in the sense that the article quotes a spokesman saying "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows".
[deleted]
The nuclear Gandhi think makes sense as naturally occuring from people trying to extrapolate hidden mechanics and false pattern detection. Pokemon had the "Press/hold B increases catch chance" illusion despite being pure RNG in the code.
>The nuclear Gandhi think makes sense as naturally occuring from people trying to extrapolate hidden mechanics and false pattern detection.
I find a lot of "Reddit knowledge" in areas where I need accurate information to do my job (vintage console repair especially) is complete bullshit, but it makes you look smart if you repeat it.
Almost always it requires an understanding of some sort of niche knowledge/art, like metal fatigue, heat transfer or potentiometers. At the same time, it's usually irrelevant to the problem at hand.
In this case, the statement is nothing more than a vehicle for showing off that you understand what integer overflow is, and therefore signalling to others how smart you are.
And that said, I've probably repeated the "Nuclear Gandhi" myth to a dozen other people, complete with a short explanation of unsigned integer overflow.
I find a lot of "Reddit knowledge" in areas where I need accurate information to do my job (vintage console repair especially) is complete bullshit, but it makes you look smart if you repeat it.
Almost always it requires an understanding of some sort of niche knowledge/art, like metal fatigue, heat transfer or potentiometers. At the same time, it's usually irrelevant to the problem at hand.
In this case, the statement is nothing more than a vehicle for showing off that you understand what integer overflow is, and therefore signalling to others how smart you are.
And that said, I've probably repeated the "Nuclear Gandhi" myth to a dozen other people, complete with a short explanation of unsigned integer overflow.
> The nuclear Gandhi think makes sense as naturally occuring from people trying to extrapolate hidden mechanics and false pattern detection.
Well, no. It's not something you could believe if you ever played Civilization with Gandhi. (Which is itself relatively uncommon - he can only appear in half of games that are configured with 6 opponents. With fewer than 6 opponents, he can't appear at all.)
I almost never played 7-player games, but I can tell you from long experience that it's not plausible for any civilization to be more aggressive than the Zulus. For Gandhi to be "25 times more aggressive" than the other civilizations in the game, he'd need to start breaking peace treaties several times per turn as soon as he developed Democracy.
And even then, Democracy arrives long, long before nuclear weapons. Gandhi would never have been noted for an affinity for nukes[1] - he'd have been noted for an affinity for stabbing you in the back with horse-mounted knights.
The nuclear Gandhi thing makes sense as an example of someone who is completely unfamiliar with a system making up behavior that he thinks sounds interesting. But not as an example of people detecting false patterns. The true patterns are too obvious.
[1] Nukes aren't likely to come up in a game of Civilization in any event. They appear too late; you'll win or lose before they're relevant.
Well, no. It's not something you could believe if you ever played Civilization with Gandhi. (Which is itself relatively uncommon - he can only appear in half of games that are configured with 6 opponents. With fewer than 6 opponents, he can't appear at all.)
I almost never played 7-player games, but I can tell you from long experience that it's not plausible for any civilization to be more aggressive than the Zulus. For Gandhi to be "25 times more aggressive" than the other civilizations in the game, he'd need to start breaking peace treaties several times per turn as soon as he developed Democracy.
And even then, Democracy arrives long, long before nuclear weapons. Gandhi would never have been noted for an affinity for nukes[1] - he'd have been noted for an affinity for stabbing you in the back with horse-mounted knights.
The nuclear Gandhi thing makes sense as an example of someone who is completely unfamiliar with a system making up behavior that he thinks sounds interesting. But not as an example of people detecting false patterns. The true patterns are too obvious.
[1] Nukes aren't likely to come up in a game of Civilization in any event. They appear too late; you'll win or lose before they're relevant.
Yes, part of the cleverness of that false claim was that Civilization 1 was already so old when the claim was made, that most people hadn't played it, or at least hadn't played in the last decade, and therefore couldn't refute it from memory or by booting it up.
[deleted]
I must have been tricked by this and repeated this more than a few times, no idea where I first heard it. Or am I being tricked by _this_ authoritative sounding post? I don't know which one, but I know this for certain: I'm being duped one way or another!
Someone ask Raymond Chen.
I worked on code where we had to be careful about this - but this was even before Windows 10. It was an issue with XP, Vista, 7, etc., because they didn't follow the "year" convention, so you couldn't check the version (which you might do with old enough software to be sure that it was running on an OS that your small team could support) by just using the marketing version and some clever `version >= 98` logic.
I saw dozens of bugs in apps that didn't handle iOS 10 correctly. They looked at one digit to determine what the device's capabilities were and saw a "1" so they did whack stuff.
In the absence of a more credible theory, many people roll with that explanation. It does kind of make sense.
Some similar thing happened to be once: years ago I made a fun fake image, photoshopping some text into a place in a very realistic manner, and posted to Facebook (which was popular those times). It was in one of my albums, me and a few friends had a laugh, then we've forgotten about it, as usual.
Then a few years later I started seeing the image I created as "real" in various forums to legitimate publishers and major newspaper websites. Everyone believed in the image, taking it as a fact (which is fair as it looked legitimate and was posted from a "reputable" source), commented under it with various levels of confusion.
I still Google that time to time to giggle a bit, but it also shows how Internet people tend to copy stuff from random places (e.g. My Facebook album) and post in various places and things go viral exponentially without almost anyone questioning it.
Then a few years later I started seeing the image I created as "real" in various forums to legitimate publishers and major newspaper websites. Everyone believed in the image, taking it as a fact (which is fair as it looked legitimate and was posted from a "reputable" source), commented under it with various levels of confusion.
I still Google that time to time to giggle a bit, but it also shows how Internet people tend to copy stuff from random places (e.g. My Facebook album) and post in various places and things go viral exponentially without almost anyone questioning it.
There are companies that scrape Twitter and have human adjudicators who try to find buried but impactful trending news gems. I wonder if this stems from them...
[deleted]
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.
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.
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.
"It was a parody account, which was labeled as such."
I'm looking at the page now and you use the Mountain View California city crest as the image, "MV Police Blotter" as the title, and it is described as "Keeping tabs on crime in Mountain View, Ca. Not affiliated with MVPD, see @MountainViewPD. Report all emergencies to 911."
That does not read as "this is parody" to me. You may not have intended to deceive but I would bet most people visiting would expect this to be actual police blotter information.
I'm looking at the page now and you use the Mountain View California city crest as the image, "MV Police Blotter" as the title, and it is described as "Keeping tabs on crime in Mountain View, Ca. Not affiliated with MVPD, see @MountainViewPD. Report all emergencies to 911."
That does not read as "this is parody" to me. You may not have intended to deceive but I would bet most people visiting would expect this to be actual police blotter information.
And yet wouldn't we expect a journalist who reads a tweet from an account that says, as you pointed out, "Not affiliated with MVPD," to do their due diligence and reach out to an official channel?
I can grant that it doesn't actually say "parody" in it's description, but we should still be expecting more effort from reporters.
I can grant that it doesn't actually say "parody" in it's description, but we should still be expecting more effort from reporters.
Ten years ago I would have agreed with you. These days I know that humans are too gullible to be able to understand obvious satire, and the consequences are deleterious for society. As someone who has long appreciated The Onion, I am now of the opinion that they should not legally be allowed to call themselves a news source, in the same way that someone cannot legally claim to be an expert in an accredited field. We don't need to censor The Onion, but we do need to establish norms regarding false advertising in journalism. I understand this won't be a popular opinion, because lots of people don't want to realize that the internet has killed the very concept of satire.
I’m going to assume you’re not being sarcastic.
At some threshold we shouldn’t need to dumb it down any further. I think journalists being able to tell the difference between parody, that’s clearly labelled as parody, and real news is already lower than I’d set that bar.
Ask yourself what’s the value in journalism if they’re just going to build a story off of a tweet with no verification/ fact checking?
At some threshold we shouldn’t need to dumb it down any further. I think journalists being able to tell the difference between parody, that’s clearly labelled as parody, and real news is already lower than I’d set that bar.
Ask yourself what’s the value in journalism if they’re just going to build a story off of a tweet with no verification/ fact checking?
That’s ridiculous because we don’t have the ability to censor the entire internet to police what websites call themselves “news”. If your solution to this is to police the word “news”, it’s dead on arrival.
People claim they are engineers/doctors/lawyers on the internet all of the time and there is no repercussion. We are only able to actually police those terms when it comes to actual business transactions.
People claim they are engineers/doctors/lawyers on the internet all of the time and there is no repercussion. We are only able to actually police those terms when it comes to actual business transactions.
Talk about self-fuffilling prophecy. It is like saying that because your legs are a little scrawny you should stay in a wheelchair for the rest of your life.
Exposing the failings of the sources of information is always a good thing. Trust is not some resource which is an unconditional good. It must be worthy of it to be any good. Otherwise it is like thinking that if you give your dog all As in premed and med school he will become a capable doctor.
Exposing the failings of the sources of information is always a good thing. Trust is not some resource which is an unconditional good. It must be worthy of it to be any good. Otherwise it is like thinking that if you give your dog all As in premed and med school he will become a capable doctor.
It must really suck to be gullible.
But how would they know?
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?
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?
Why add entropy to the situation? We know people mid-understand satire and sarcasm.
I do kind of feel much satire is deliberately harmful - people use it to say things and then hide behind ‘but I was just joking’ having already pushed the message out.
I do kind of feel much satire is deliberately harmful - people use it to say things and then hide behind ‘but I was just joking’ having already pushed the message out.
It's not my job to cater to people who choose to get their "news" from a website where anyone can post anything under any identity at all. There has never been any credibility to Twitter as an authoritative news source, especially from accounts that are clearly labeled as a joke. Silencing or shaming folks for being creative in public is far worse than empowering the layman (or lazy journalist) to get their news from the gutter.
People will post lies online regardless of whether the good intentioned folks self censor or not. The problem is not the satire, it's the blind trust.
Speaking of which, I've got a rich client who recent passed away and left a significant sum to one Chris Seaton. If that's you, just shoot me your bank details and I'll get the money wired to you directly.
People will post lies online regardless of whether the good intentioned folks self censor or not. The problem is not the satire, it's the blind trust.
Speaking of which, I've got a rich client who recent passed away and left a significant sum to one Chris Seaton. If that's you, just shoot me your bank details and I'll get the money wired to you directly.
Something tells me you also regard stand-up comedy as harmful.
Nobody confuses a stand-up club as news - people do confuse Twitter as news.
“My use case for satire is obvious but yours is not”
And I knew folks who thought Spinal Tap was a real band. Satire is therapeutic when the crap around us gets too deep.
I mean are you suggesting no more jokes, parodies, or satire lest a journalist take it seriously? That would practically require a complete self censor on all fiction. I could just easily tweet a blurb from a Sci-fi novel and risk someone, somewhere, misinterpreting it. Also a prank has the intent to mislead which the poster didn’t. Don’t mean to sound inflammatory but the humorless world that would be sounds a lot more miserable than living in the mess it seeks to remedy.
"It's just a prank bro" would be inexcusable for someone mocking up a screenshot to make it look like someone was sending racist DMs to get them fired, or something on that level. But this is not anything like that, it was a funny comment in a forum where funny comments are made that was taken at face value by a credulous reporter who should've done their job better. It wasn't hateful, offensive or dangerous.
In addition, you've completely altered what the author of the blog post was saying. They're not using the dismissive "It's just a prank bro", they've actually written quite a thoughtful post explaining the context behind the incident. They didn't apologise but they didn't need to.
In addition, you've completely altered what the author of the blog post was saying. They're not using the dismissive "It's just a prank bro", they've actually written quite a thoughtful post explaining the context behind the incident. They didn't apologise but they didn't need to.
Yes, it is extremely extremist to call for canceling all works of fiction.
Most works of fiction is labeled as such. I don't see anything against them in this comment.
Can't wait for the return of Tipper Gore and labelling anything that offends. /s
I kinda love how that effort backfired, and the "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" became a fairly cool symbol
I don't call for labeling. I'm just saying that most of fiction can be easily identified and nobody in the comments has issues with that. Previous comment implied that someone wants to cancel all works of fiction.
So much ad absurdum in this thread...
So much ad absurdum in this thread...
[deleted]
One very important concept of journalism is getting a fact “verified.” Often you need either an incredibly trusted source or multiple sources. The journalist should not have reported it. But their fact checker committed a grave error by allowing a story to run with “some rando on Twitter said…” as the only source.
*some rando claiming to be a parody on Twitter
A tweet isn't any more evidence than a person you don't know and have never met spraypainting the same thing on a wall.
The problem is how news outlets that care so little about the quality of the information they present continue to exist.
The problem is how news outlets that care so little about the quality of the information they present continue to exist.
[deleted]
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.
Twitter should crack down on this misinformation.
> There are many such people spreading misinformation about chickens crossing roads.
Do these people explain why the chickens were crossing the roads?
Do these people explain why the chickens were crossing the roads?
“Bok-bok-bok-b’CAUSE,” one chicken said, when asked why it crossed the road.
The Register: Cause for chicken road-crossing identified
HN: Clearly the original user who purported to have recorded what a chicken said is lying. He hasn’t learnt anything from the whole thing. What a misinformer. Practically Pravda.
HN: Clearly the original user who purported to have recorded what a chicken said is lying. He hasn’t learnt anything from the whole thing. What a misinformer. Practically Pravda.
I would agree with you, depending on the day of the week.
> Do you feel responsible for generating misinformation?
This is a bizarre stance to take. Social media was always filled with false information. It's entirely on news outlets to verify what they decide to publish.
This is a bizarre stance to take. Social media was always filled with false information. It's entirely on news outlets to verify what they decide to publish.
Why fuel the problem by seeding more false information?
Should we also remove the fiction section from libraries?
Does anyone in practice confuse books from the fiction section with news? People do in practice confuse Tweets every second of every day.
For the past few years, the best selling books on Amazon have been misinformation about the pandemic, virology, and "critical race theory" (if that even means anything anymore). Your reasoning is tortured at best.
Are they sold in the fiction section?
[deleted]
I feel like the actual answer really undermines your point more than you think
> Should we also remove the fiction section from libraries?
Are people confused by the fiction section?
> Well people publish weird stuff in the non-fiction section as well.
Ok... what's that got to do with the fiction section you were talking about?
Are people confused by the fiction section?
> Well people publish weird stuff in the non-fiction section as well.
Ok... what's that got to do with the fiction section you were talking about?
[deleted]
Are you trying to get out of jury duty?
Why should it be socially acceptable to generate misinformation? It's in the end harmful for everyone. (I don't mean obvious parody and fiction, clearly labeled as such).
My comment is about news outlet's obligation to verify information they publish. I never said anything about posting satire by individuals.
Someone asked if thread author feels responsible. You responded with "that's bizarre stance to take", therefore implying, that it's weird to frown upon individuals posting "satire".
I fully agree news outlets should verify what they publish. Still what this guy did was kinda crappy and I fail to see any humor in that. (before someone starts implying something I didn't say - I don't call to "cancel him", "ban him" or whatever you do this days)
I fully agree news outlets should verify what they publish. Still what this guy did was kinda crappy and I fail to see any humor in that. (before someone starts implying something I didn't say - I don't call to "cancel him", "ban him" or whatever you do this days)
The lesson is mainly that few news sources these days do anything like fact checking, with bothering to care at all if what they are reporting may be true or not.
If you can accidentally plant a false, story imagine doing so intentionally.
Or just imagine all the things you see shared on social media that didn't start from a made-up story exactly, but still get important things wrong just through the game of telephone and becaues media outlets don't bother trying to ensure they mostly report true things.
We really do live in a post-fact society.
If you can accidentally plant a false, story imagine doing so intentionally.
Or just imagine all the things you see shared on social media that didn't start from a made-up story exactly, but still get important things wrong just through the game of telephone and becaues media outlets don't bother trying to ensure they mostly report true things.
We really do live in a post-fact society.
I don’t know how true that is. I look at old news from the Victorian era and there was a lot of bullshit then too.
The difference now is the distributed nature of both the bullshit generation and fact-checking.
The difference now is the distributed nature of both the bullshit generation and fact-checking.
Yep. People confuse detection related correlations with causation all of the time.
It doesn't even matter. The facts of a news story aren't very relevant to the opinions people form. Instead, news largely leads people to get emotional hostile feelings about outgroups. It doesn't matter if mother Theresa saved a dying beggar or a terrorist bombed a hospital. Whatever the story, and whatever the facts, people will go away hating whoever the news hijacked their minds into hating.
If you're concerned about facts being true, you're missing the real problem of divisive hate-inducing news.
If you're concerned about facts being true, you're missing the real problem of divisive hate-inducing news.
You're suggesting the right way to deal with the "real problem" of hate-inducing news is... to be unconcerned with whether facts are true? Really? Like, being concerned about whether facts are true in an article about a software bug harms your ability to deal with this real problem? What's the way you recommend to handle this problem, that is based on being unconcerned with whether facts are true?
I'm not totally sure it's relevant to this particular story, but now I'm curious, are you suggesting this story about a joke bug report is an example of that real problem of hate-inducing news? (I mean, it might be).
I'm not totally sure it's relevant to this particular story, but now I'm curious, are you suggesting this story about a joke bug report is an example of that real problem of hate-inducing news? (I mean, it might be).
Yea, for the most part, it doesn't matter if news is false, I don't think. We don't do anything with that information, just experience feelings.
You might say, what if it has real consequences like who gets elected, having a war, or making personal lifestyle choices? Yes, but true news already influences people to make bad decisions like that using its emotional tricks, so what's the difference? At least if it's all false, people won't take it so seriously. I think the truth in news is mostly there to enhance entertainment value, like a movie that's "based on a true story" is more satisfying than one that isn't.
I wasn't thinking of this particular story. Doesn't seem vary hate-inducing to me, but the meta-story about how journalists aren't doing their job does!
You might say, what if it has real consequences like who gets elected, having a war, or making personal lifestyle choices? Yes, but true news already influences people to make bad decisions like that using its emotional tricks, so what's the difference? At least if it's all false, people won't take it so seriously. I think the truth in news is mostly there to enhance entertainment value, like a movie that's "based on a true story" is more satisfying than one that isn't.
I wasn't thinking of this particular story. Doesn't seem vary hate-inducing to me, but the meta-story about how journalists aren't doing their job does!
Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday is a book about exactly this. People 100% do plant fake news stories all the time to suit their purposes.
Why would you believe it was ever better?
Speaking of unique identifiers: when I was like 13, my parents bought new ethernet cards so that all the kids would have their own computer. Two adjacent ones on the shelf that happened to have the same MAC address. Not sure how they figured it out (probably just looking for anything wrong and noticing the MAC addresses were identical), but the network behavior was interesting. Basically if you mashed F5 on a webpage the router would think you were the proper owner of all the network traffic for both computers, and it would disconnect your sibling from whatever they were playing at the time.
The company was just lazy and/or cheap as MACs aren't even supposed to be randomly assigned or hard to come by. You can get a block of 16,777,216 globally unique MACs for a one time fee, currently just $3,180 dollars or 1/50th a penny per MAC.
Duplicate MACs were (well, still are) a huge problem in places with multiple on prem VM pods with shared networks. It's one of those things that seems automatically handled until you realize it's not ALL automatically handled for you.
Duplicate MACs were (well, still are) a huge problem in places with multiple on prem VM pods with shared networks. It's one of those things that seems automatically handled until you realize it's not ALL automatically handled for you.
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.
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.
No jokes are great when people are in on them. That's why the punchline doesn't come first.
That’s a different type of joke.
It’s why we laugh at “it’s behind you” in a pantomime. We’re in on the joke that the actor knows it’s behind them.
It’s why we laugh at “it’s behind you” in a pantomime. We’re in on the joke that the actor knows it’s behind them.
[deleted]
"Everything on the internet is false, unless proven otherwise" - Abraham Lincoln.
The author seems explicitly to indicate that they're not chiding anyone, nor defending themselves:
> It's not meant to bash news outlets over journalistic integrity. The internet is a difficult thing to document. It's not meant to justify my joke. If you don't think it was funny... OK. Depending on the day I'm sure I'd agree with you.
> It's not meant to bash news outlets over journalistic integrity. The internet is a difficult thing to document. It's not meant to justify my joke. If you don't think it was funny... OK. Depending on the day I'm sure I'd agree with you.
It's self congratulatory not defensive. If I claim that I am not chiding you, but then write an entire blog post on how I was able to pull one over on you, one of those should speak louder than the other.
Think what we're all learning here is that you have neither a sense of humour nor a sense of perspective. What actual bad thing happened here? It's just a fun whimsical incident. I actually think it says more about your self esteem than anything else that you read this as self-congratulatory
> If someone reports about the most improbable thing in the universe happening, then you ought to check on sources.
Except that part was clearly an exaggeration and it's very easy for a few bytes to overlap, or for many many byte sequences to cause a reboot.
Even if the post wasn't meant to be plausible, it is a plausible off-the-cuff explanation, and I wish the author would realize that before making criticisms like this.
Except that part was clearly an exaggeration and it's very easy for a few bytes to overlap, or for many many byte sequences to cause a reboot.
Even if the post wasn't meant to be plausible, it is a plausible off-the-cuff explanation, and I wish the author would realize that before making criticisms like this.
You're picking one little detail that might in some sort of circumstances be plausible from a story in which almost all of the details are implausible or nonsensical after the first cursory glance. That's a very... ineffective way to assess plausibility.
What parts are implausible? The port is obviously fine. Lan communication between rokus makes sense. And it might have updates or other things, but it's just a reboot so that doesn't even matter. "exact same bytes" sounds harder than it is. Then a silly probability joke.
And that's about it for the original post, it was only a couple sentences.
It's entirely believable as someone who mostly knows what the problem is, but doesn't have a perfect understanding, tossing it into a quick reddit post.
And that's about it for the original post, it was only a couple sentences.
It's entirely believable as someone who mostly knows what the problem is, but doesn't have a perfect understanding, tossing it into a quick reddit post.
Most of it is implausible.
Are fleets of 100s of Rokus used in commercial settings? A quick google suggests no.
Do fleets of commercial network devices typically implement some weird peer-to-peer leader election thing to... save some bandwidth on updates? Also no, centralized management service/console is both way easier to implement and a desirable feature to boot. Chances are that's how device fleets are managed in places you've worked.
Then what is 'a quarter mil in CDN fees'? Once? Per update? Per month or year? Oddly specific details like this are often a hallmark of a tall tale and this one is both oddly specific and oddly nonsensical.
We also have to believe a billion dollar revenue company did this much more convoluted, complicated and highly atypical thing to save $250k and then just left it completely vulnerable to trivial replay attacks.
Could one or some of these things, plausibly, happen? Maybe. Taken together, though, it's a house of cards and every card is a joker.
Are fleets of 100s of Rokus used in commercial settings? A quick google suggests no.
Do fleets of commercial network devices typically implement some weird peer-to-peer leader election thing to... save some bandwidth on updates? Also no, centralized management service/console is both way easier to implement and a desirable feature to boot. Chances are that's how device fleets are managed in places you've worked.
Then what is 'a quarter mil in CDN fees'? Once? Per update? Per month or year? Oddly specific details like this are often a hallmark of a tall tale and this one is both oddly specific and oddly nonsensical.
We also have to believe a billion dollar revenue company did this much more convoluted, complicated and highly atypical thing to save $250k and then just left it completely vulnerable to trivial replay attacks.
Could one or some of these things, plausibly, happen? Maybe. Taken together, though, it's a house of cards and every card is a joker.
I've learned long ago: always read the original source material. Its amazing how, not just a game of telephone develops, but groupthink when people are taking their cues from others instead of their own experiences. A lot of people will even read the original source and then force it to mean what some smarter dude or "everyone" already knows. Meaning is so rapidly lost when its second-hand.
The amount of “news” reporting that is simply reporting that something was said on Twitter or Reddit is getting out of co trol.
The worst are the articles that consist almost entirely a series of tweets with 3-12 likes each, just repeating a headline that aligns perfectly with the editorial slant of the outlet.
It’s bad enough when it’s an ad (the “Bob on Twitter says JIRA sucks” seems a common ad these days) but the laziness to make that actual reporting?
Or perhaps reporting has been in decline for decades and were just finally seeing it.
Or perhaps reporting has been in decline for decades and were just finally seeing it.
So, was the true cause of the problem ever published?
I think Roku just issued a patch, no fancy blog post detailing the low level bits or anything. That said it wouldn't be anything more than "crappy protocol parser" just not because it conflicts with the signing key like the joke goes. (also I think it may have actually been a different port number).
I read through that and I still wasn't sure if he was being serious or not.
Same. I didn't see a joke. Were Roku devices rebooting? Was it being caused by a Pokemon game? No idea what is going on here.
The part in "the joke" contains the joke, all of the other sections are not.
Pokemon Sword/Shield was really causing Roku devices to boot until Roku issued a patch as the "background" section details.
The joke was this involved a collision with some signed Roku command and that's the fluke our universe gets over a planet of Justin Timberlake clones. It's not a "2 guys and a priest walk into the bar" type joke, it was on /r/programminghumor after all.
Pokemon Sword/Shield was really causing Roku devices to boot until Roku issued a patch as the "background" section details.
The joke was this involved a collision with some signed Roku command and that's the fluke our universe gets over a planet of Justin Timberlake clones. It's not a "2 guys and a priest walk into the bar" type joke, it was on /r/programminghumor after all.
It's a very loose interpretation of the word joke. It was more of an apocryphal explanation for a Roku bug.
So the media circus was about a real bug? Sounds like a legitimate media story.
An April Fools Day prank played by Seattle's local satire show, Almost Live, was repeated as actual news. This is despite the gag had "April Fools Day" text overlaying the joke.
https://www.king5.com/article/features/the-april-fools-day-p...
Looks like KING5 removed the video again. Sigh.
https://www.king5.com/article/features/the-april-fools-day-p...
Looks like KING5 removed the video again. Sigh.
A similar thing that's been bothering me is the meme about "The difference between poisonous and venomous is if you eat it and you die, it's poisonous, if it bites you and you die, it's venomous", with endless discussions about how it's wrong to call snakes poisonous. In reality, if you check the dictionary, poison is "any harmful substance", while venom is "a poison synthesized by an animal, usually for hunting or self-defence".
The etymology of the words kind of sort of supports the meme, but I never managed to find historical evidence of the difference in meaning being as outlined. Both come from Latin, so it's not the case like cow vs beef where the Germanic word gets a new meaning because the language adopts a French word alongside it. Additionally no other European language makes that distinction and it's extremely rare for a concept to exist only in English.
I've tried to hunt down where this confusion started and it seems to be some meme English teachers repeat, like "i before e except after c". Australians in particular are very invested in it.
The etymology of the words kind of sort of supports the meme, but I never managed to find historical evidence of the difference in meaning being as outlined. Both come from Latin, so it's not the case like cow vs beef where the Germanic word gets a new meaning because the language adopts a French word alongside it. Additionally no other European language makes that distinction and it's extremely rare for a concept to exist only in English.
I've tried to hunt down where this confusion started and it seems to be some meme English teachers repeat, like "i before e except after c". Australians in particular are very invested in it.
Blindly repeating the misinformed comment "it's not assault, it's battery" is virtually guaranteed to garner dozens of upvotes from the types of people who live for that kind of pedantry (which is, on Reddit, a lot).
I think the oddest bit of this is the author “doxing” their trolling on Reddit with their actual identity on the blog.
Something similar seemed to happen recently during the NCAA tournament, when the St Peters Peacocks won a major upset over Purdue on March 25. News outlets from NBC to the WSJ all reported that March 25 was "National Peacock Day", and a Google search for "When is national peacock day" seems to confirm this with a knowledge panel.
If you dig deeper though, there actually appears to be no such day, and the first reference to it other than a Draft Kings blog post was a Peacock Day event being held at the LA Arboretum years back.
Obviously such a trivial story has no real impact on the world, but it was eye-opening to see how a "fact" could essentially be brought to life out of nowhere.
If you dig deeper though, there actually appears to be no such day, and the first reference to it other than a Draft Kings blog post was a Peacock Day event being held at the LA Arboretum years back.
Obviously such a trivial story has no real impact on the world, but it was eye-opening to see how a "fact" could essentially be brought to life out of nowhere.
I think the thing Google is falsely keying in on is actualy "Everyday Angels: national Day Journal" by Linda Finstad published in late 2020. She made a Pinterest post about the March 25th page being national peacock day which is what Google picked up which someone somehow noticed resulting in the coverage.
Of course nationally peacock day isn't actually a thing, even in Canada where Linda seems to be from, so I wonder where she got the idea! She has a website with a contact form so I sent her a short backstory on how I came to be contacting her and asked if she knew where she got March 25th as national peacock day. At the very least she'll probably be amused.
Of course nationally peacock day isn't actually a thing, even in Canada where Linda seems to be from, so I wonder where she got the idea! She has a website with a contact form so I sent her a short backstory on how I came to be contacting her and asked if she knew where she got March 25th as national peacock day. At the very least she'll probably be amused.
This kind of thing is why I think Google's answers (not search results, the snippets with big bolded answers to questions) are dangerous. They're automatically generated from some pretty naive parsing of text from sources of dubious quality. I have found several pretty serious errors in these snippets when Googling for gardening advice.
This all reminds me of Stephen Colbert having a field day with "truthiness" already 17 (!) years ago. And "wikiality", when the population of elephants suddenly tripled thanks to his Wikipedia-editing efforts. (And much later, "Trumpiness".)
It's not just news articles. We've come to a point where such jokes manipulate entire generations and create social movements ...
This is validating my decision to mute tech twitter hype accounts like TylerGlaiel and SwiftOnSoftware many months ago.
This joke got me thinking, is there a way to calculate the number of times events of a certain improbability could have possibly occurred in the current time the universe has existed? What do the odds look like for an event so improbable it could have possibly only occurred once so far??
Is there no registry of common network ports, protocols, and packet leading bytes? Similar to mimetypes...
Poe's law is in full effect, so I'll just leave this here.
https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
On *nix systems there's a file (usually /etc/services) that maps protocol/service names to ports. Back in the 90s I was working as a solutions architect for a Bay Area software company and among other duties I occasionally would help install the software at client sites (think big telcos). One component of the system relied on a service name to identify a port to talk to another component (I think to do a licensing check). For some reason there was no direct way to just specify a port number, so the standard method of installation included editing /etc/services to add the mapping. Editing that file requires root permissions, which at most customers meant I had to get a sysadmin to actually do that step, but it's a simple text file (much like /etc/hosts) so it only takes them a minute to do it once I could get their attention. At one customer I ran into a sysadmin who simply refused, and said if we wanted to be in /etc/services we needed to get the IANA to allocate us a port and then we needed to get the Unix vendor (I think Sun in this particular case) to update their distribution. If even possible this process would take months at best. After wasting almost $20,000 of my time on this (what the client paid my employer, not what I got paid sadly) someone in the org finally arranged for that one particular machine to no longer be that sysadmin's responsibility, and found someone else to make the edit. His final passive aggressive act was to change the motd of that machine to something like "This machine is not managed by the sysadmin team and should not be used for any business critical operations".
> Is there no registry of common network ports, protocols
Ethernet protocol numbers: https://www.iana.org/assignments/ieee-802-numbers/ieee-802-n...
IP protocol numbers: https://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-n...
Transport protocol ports: https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
> and packet leading bytes
No registry for this past the transport layer, standard protocols will tell you in their standards though.
That said I don't think having a registry solves the problem you're implying it does, there are only 65k ports but >65k protocols wanting to use ports so dealing with overlap is a requirement if things want to operate at that layer. Not to mention it's better practice to handle invalid data gracefully anyways.
Ethernet protocol numbers: https://www.iana.org/assignments/ieee-802-numbers/ieee-802-n...
IP protocol numbers: https://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-n...
Transport protocol ports: https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
> and packet leading bytes
No registry for this past the transport layer, standard protocols will tell you in their standards though.
That said I don't think having a registry solves the problem you're implying it does, there are only 65k ports but >65k protocols wanting to use ports so dealing with overlap is a requirement if things want to operate at that layer. Not to mention it's better practice to handle invalid data gracefully anyways.
[deleted]
This is called the Woozle Effect. Some of the things you believe may even be Woozles.
This article just makes me more curious to know what the truth was.
[deleted]
Pretty weird "joke" or "a slightly funny hypothetical". It's a plausible but false explanation for an event people were trying to understand, posted to a programming forum. It feels more like disinformation to me. I think it was a bit unethical to not mark it as fictional.
It does feel more like a hoax/prank than a joke, but I’m not sure I’d call /r/programmerhumor a “programming forum”.
[deleted]
Sense of humor is replaced by sensitivity-derived outrage.
This doesn't seem like a joke, it seems like a guy outright spreading misinformation. Not sure what was the point of the UUID preamble, his "joke" has nothing to say about UUIDs.
And his link to the Google collision was not an accidental collision, like the rest of his ramblings were discussing.
Right - that’s a SHA1 collision, which has nothing to do with the possibility of a UUID collision.
I worry that some people might take away from this that UUID collisions are actually something to worry about (nonsensical kindergarten cubby analogies and so on).
Really, truly, UUIDs can be assumed unique. We’re not relying on luck.
I worry that some people might take away from this that UUID collisions are actually something to worry about (nonsensical kindergarten cubby analogies and so on).
Really, truly, UUIDs can be assumed unique. We’re not relying on luck.
The humorous musings are, despite the unlikelihood of collisions the author was pondering them for UUID (see backpack cubby analogy), this situation came up and then pondered what might have happened with a similarly unlikely collision -- byte identifiers between Roku and Pokemon. It's silly, it's in a humour forum.
The probability of getting a UUID collision is different from an intentional attempt to find a SHA-1 collision. One is guessing a truly random ~128 bit number (really - it’s effectively the output of a CSPRNG). The other is exploiting a weakness in the construction of a 160-bit value that is intended to be a secure mapping of input -> output. It’s not even remotely the same problem and saying evidence of a sha-1 collision indicates anything about a UUID collision is plain wrong (and that part isn’t on a humor forum).
>saying evidence of a sha-1 collision indicates anything about a UUID collision is plain wrong //
No one said that, so ...
No one said that, so ...
Did you read or skim?
> The odds of two UUIDs being generated with the same values on the same system is very low
…snip analogy description
> Except it could still happen. You usually get some hand-waiving from software engineers when you say this, but... collisions could still happen. Google found one.
That last bit is a link to Google brute forcing a sha1 digest
> The odds of two UUIDs being generated with the same values on the same system is very low
…snip analogy description
> Except it could still happen. You usually get some hand-waiving from software engineers when you say this, but... collisions could still happen. Google found one.
That last bit is a link to Google brute forcing a sha1 digest
Only if people take seriously the posts random anonymous strangers make on r/programmerhumor. The real source of disinformation here is whomever decided to repeat the dry humor without the context of it coming from a joke subreddit.
Some people will believe everything they read, and they are friends with people who will believe everything they heard from a friend.
Don't joke too hard on the internet.
4chan once decided to promote the idea that the "a-ok sign" (making a circle with your thumb and finger) is a white supremacist coded symbol, basically as a test of how easily gulled the press is about such issues.
Well, the press got gulled, and today displaying the symbol can get you fired, or banned from certain locations. The ADL considers it a hate symbol.
4chan once decided to promote the idea that the "a-ok sign" (making a circle with your thumb and finger) is a white supremacist coded symbol, basically as a test of how easily gulled the press is about such issues.
Well, the press got gulled, and today displaying the symbol can get you fired, or banned from certain locations. The ADL considers it a hate symbol.
While it is true that it started as a 4-chan hoax, and the ADL considers it a hate symbol, that's not the entire story. The page of the ADL[0] explicitly mention that in the vast majority of cases it just means ok. Much like how 14 and 88 are perfectly normal numbers, but when someone uses a personalised numberplate Adolf1488 they probably didn't choose those numbers at random.
It's also that symbols and gestures evolve in a social context, people, language, customs and culture changes. It's not unthinkable for symbols to get a worse connotation over time because a group used them a lot. So the question then becomes, do actual white supremacists consistently use the symbol as a way to identify themselves? Eh, I don't think that's the case anymore or in meaningful quantities. But after the populairty of the hoax white supremacists did co-opt it for a while. Is it still completely meaningless if a racist mass-murderer flashes the symbol?
So yeah, indeed it started as a hoax, but the implication that the ADL only included it because they were somehow gulled by a hoax is incorrect.
(As an aside, the OK-gesture is quite culturally different and dependent on context in the first place. Had a mate who while drunk almost started a fight with some Turkish dudes by flashing it, since apparently it mimics the asshole and basically means "you're an asshole". And in France it apparently means that you're a zero, since it looks like a zero.)
[0]: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...
It's also that symbols and gestures evolve in a social context, people, language, customs and culture changes. It's not unthinkable for symbols to get a worse connotation over time because a group used them a lot. So the question then becomes, do actual white supremacists consistently use the symbol as a way to identify themselves? Eh, I don't think that's the case anymore or in meaningful quantities. But after the populairty of the hoax white supremacists did co-opt it for a while. Is it still completely meaningless if a racist mass-murderer flashes the symbol?
So yeah, indeed it started as a hoax, but the implication that the ADL only included it because they were somehow gulled by a hoax is incorrect.
(As an aside, the OK-gesture is quite culturally different and dependent on context in the first place. Had a mate who while drunk almost started a fight with some Turkish dudes by flashing it, since apparently it mimics the asshole and basically means "you're an asshole". And in France it apparently means that you're a zero, since it looks like a zero.)
[0]: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...
Show a poll that people don't associate it like how it's always been
[deleted]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21566921