it seems I'm the only one around here who like the story (of the incest story)
I saw the original on reddit front page (with it 12k upvote, or something). Read the TL;DR and the update, and didnt care much.
What I like, is how someone can craft a story that thousand of people will upvote. What talent do you need to make a story viral?
Now that I think about it, I remember the same story a few year back: A brother pretending he and his sister banged for years.
It was debunked by the users within few hours of it becoming viral. I remember because my most upvoted submission, was a mockup of the original in r/circlejerk : https://www.reddit.com/r/circlejerk/comments/mt85z/i_never_slept_with_my_sister_amaa/
Sounds like a self righteous OP. I can't stand the weird superiority complex people get over the whole question everything dribble. Question things that matter and you'll do just fine. It really doesn't matter at all if somebody is actually screwing their brother, like not even remotely. People aren't going to start questioning the important things just because somebody lied about screwing their brother.
It's happened so many times that unfortunately it is a non-story that they think they were "exposing". No reasonable person with experience on reddit or any other social media site would take these throwaway posts seriously. /u/LucidEnding was the worst.... a Gawker writer who pretended he was going to be euthanized in the next few hours. But had basic facts wrong about how it worked in Oregon (even though the writer's undergrad thesis was about that specifically). So many people fell for it and I got downvoted to hell for posting about how fake the post was. People can not even trust non-throwaway posts. Anyone remember elderly reddit celebrity mayonnaise king /u/grandpawiggly who faked his existence and experience for years? I am sure there are dozens of those "creative writing" experiments going on at any one time on reddit. The real problem is that I suspect many "journalists" who report on these accounts know that it is suspect or fake but simply do not care. They just want the clicks from the inexperienced who are not web savvy.
Things that affect your life = important, things that affect the lives of people you care about = important, things that have the ability to affect the way the world works = important. Who somebody is screwing = unimportant, whether or not somebody is actually sleeping with the person they say they are = unimportant because as we learnt before who somebody is screwing = unimportant. That's basically it.
Exactly. I thought it was really strange that OP was trying to hunt out improper journalism, but that sub is filled with articles and posts about the fake news. The real problem is the consumers who don't know which sources are credible. In my mind, by acting like the places that picked it up were credible, OP just proved she was part of the problem.
I'll preface by saying that I'm one of those commenters on my reddit account, on this post. I ripped into her. Honestly though, I couldn't have cared less about her hoax. It was just a bother and rude to the communities she disrupted, but not something I felt personally invested in. But she posted to the journalism subreddit claiming to try to teach journalists a lesson in journalistic ethics, and then refused to listen to their advice that the ethical thing to do from a journalistic standpoint (to e-mail the sites and let them know it was a hoax). Further, her insistence on anonymity broke the journalism ethics I'm learning as a student. A lot of those comments could have used better language, but I think their sentiment was justified; in trying to prove her point (unnecessarily), she ended up corrupting the exact system she thought she could somehow fix.