I must admit I mostly lurk there and never quite made the jump culturally to lemmygrad, but I do respect your opinions and the last few days are making me feel a bit insane and wanting an outside perspective. I’ll explain and provide links for context
A longtime user got banned for bad behavior in live chat on hextube. That part isn’t all that surprising. But then we got dueling impersonators one and two making meta posts about the ban and a notorious also-banned user he had conflicted with a long time ago (melina).
This was… mostly just annoying, clearly someone was doing a nasty bit, but mods just banned them both and the site moved on which I guess is fair enough.
Fast forward to today, and we have an account (not brand new, but not a longtime account either, only a few weeks old with limited post history) purporting to be our resident China guy (and China doomer, to some extent) from the news mega, posting a long winded story about going to xinjiang and getting 1984’d or whatever. It starts to feel like it could be a bit as it gets more and more absurd, but this user was always very serious from what I recall.
If this is a troll/psyop I guess it’s a good one because this garbage is giving me a fucking headache. What do you grad’ers think is going on? Were any of these real or all impersonators (and relatedly who? melina?) Am I just too autistic to get the joke? Is this a fed psyop? what else could be going on?
“bits” are so annoying sometimes. They’re unoriginal, and it’s not a “bit” to post something that can be taken as sincere.
It’s the left version of “it’s just a prank bro”
yeah. I mean anything can be taken as sincere but you don’t have to actively deceive people for it to be funny, you can give up the bit if people are genuinely upset or believing it
I get that jokes are about misdirection, but I thought we kind of had an understanding not to push peoples buttons here. I feel like it becomes a “bit” when the OP absolutely refuses to give up the game even after the humor is gone. It’s family guy levels of beating a joke to death. Maybe I’m just crotchety and joyless, but damn, some people can’t read a room
It’s a method of wrecking. There’s some pretty famous examples online of how far you can push boundaries on websites with the use of irony and “humor”. Refusing to give up the bit until as much attention has been gathered as possible is usually a sign of that.
You get to encourage other people to push boundaries ironically, have a chunk of users who are less prone to checking comments/verifying believing the contents and you can pass it off as a bit. How convenient!
But yeah, I’m thinkin’ about it too much, probably. Guess we’ll have to wait three years to find out if the website doesn’t magically fuck itself up again.
That’s interesting. It makes a lot of sense though. It’s plausible deniability stretched so thin but it allows you a little more time to really cause damage.