The crucial detail that is a little buried in the piece is that the original 'explanation' was posted in /r/ProgrammerHumor so it said right on the tin it was a joke. But the (seemingly clearly intended as a joke) details temporarily nerd-sniped a lot of people's senses of humor right out of their brains. The HN discussion discussion from back then is still fun reading with a number of commenters very invested in the notion that it wasn't really a joke.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".)
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??
[+] [-] pvg|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21566921
[+] [-] davesque|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mdoms|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] causality0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blenderdt|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hotpotamus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tronno|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ThunderSizzle|3 years ago|reply
Your solution of stopping to consume social media doesn't work, as other mediums have been just as bad at being unbiased truthseekers.
[+] [-] bastawhiz|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] politelemon|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] can16358p|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cobertos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chrisseaton|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blowski|3 years ago|reply
The difference now is the distributed nature of both the bullshit generation and fact-checking.
[+] [-] sacrosancty|3 years ago|reply
If you're concerned about facts being true, you're missing the real problem of divisive hate-inducing news.
[+] [-] imgabe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barry-cotter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThrustVectoring|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zamadatix|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mjard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomrod|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JadeNB|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] Dylan16807|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pvg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c3534l|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captainmuon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iso1210|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bagels|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
https://www.king5.com/article/features/the-april-fools-day-p...
Looks like KING5 removed the video again. Sigh.
[+] [-] Asooka|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwthere|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrea|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qiskit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celim307|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ack210|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zamadatix|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mdoms|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numlock86|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phendrenad2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwdv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc4ndr3|3 years ago|reply