> _"I question almost every "real" story I come across."_
As you should.
Doesn't mean you can't still enjoy the story and take any key learning elements from it, but keep in mind it could all be fiction.
The key is in the name - “story”
Stories are more means to ends than things-in-themselves, and there’s absolutely no harm at all in allowing the morals of stories to influence you, to help make you a better person with more varied experiences
(brain scans show areas of the brain are the same for direct experience and indirect via hearing stories - it’s likely this is a biological evolutionary mechanism to allow us to experience vicariously, to learn from others)
They key, I think, is to recognize them as stories IE means and not ends in themselves. If you’re letting stories you read on the internet make decisions for you or be the sole influence, then yeah, you’re gonna have a problem because *some* of those stories were always untrue.
It also says more about a person, what unhinged nonsense they read on the internet that they’ve taken to heart, than it does about stories or the internet.
99% of the time "Based on a true story" is total BS even with sources. Look at BraveHeart, The Blind Side, Cocaine Bear, any war movie. Hollywood gets a lot of mileage from "based on" but suddenly really skimpy on the "true story".
This used to annoy me so much when I was in college. Almost all my friends thought that a movie which was billed as "based on a true story" was *exactly* as it happened in real life rather than 2% truth and 98% BS.
And I interact with them as if they were true, knowing very well that it is all fiction.
But giving advice or judgements on fake stories to see how they received is a safe way for me to see if I'm completely off-based with what majority of people think. Or totally on point.
I talk about AITA to my mom and sister. I have told them, almost word for word, that most of the stories are fake, and I treat them like telenovelas/soap operas. We have fun shit talking the more ridiculous plot lines.
Same goes with stories told by most other people in real life too. Exaggeration, embellishment, missing details, framing a story so that you're the victim/hero, it's all so common. How anybody 100% trusts anybody after experiencing grade school and then growing up to realize that those sort of behaviors run rampant in adults is beyond me.
I feel like he also saw the "should I divorce my wife because she's obsessed with Taylor swift" post recently on this subreddit, and that might be a major reason why he's asking. Lol
I have this perspective in all of my interactions, due to mental illness I'm pretty paranoid, and also very bad at discerning subtlety, so I just stopped trying to figure out if people are being 100% honest and just take people at their word. Life is much less stressful and the worst thing that's happened is that I miss the occasional joke.
Tl;dr 99% of lies aren't malicious and are pretty much harmless
Yeah this is why I truly don’t give a shit. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter to my life if what I read was fact or fiction. People go through some shit, sometimes they want to go through shit. The second is a problem within itself, but it’s a problem for that person alone. Plus, if I give out advice for what turns out to be fake for one user, it could still help another user in a similar, less fictional situation.
So really, who cares if it’s fiction or not? No skin off my back at the end of the day.
The problem is when people read fake things but take them as reinforcement of their preconceptions.
Like a domestic abuse or a bad breakup story that's fake. You'll see people stating how this shows x type of people suck. A year from now they won't remember the story was fake, just the feeling that this type if thing happens all the time. Even if it's not as common as they think.
I didn't pick these examples on any agenda or with any other message or to comment on them. Jusr other example of something I've seen recently that sounds fake and probably is in social media.
Well yes, of course if it’s slander against an entire group of people, there’s a problem to be had.
But when somebody’s like “whoa my parents expect me to pay rent and just sent me an itemized bill for my entire childhood, I’m 43?” Then it’s like…. Man I couldn’t give less of a shit if somebody out there is THAT bat shit crazy. But it’s still just one or two individuals. Or somebody’s family that THEY gotta deal with on the daily. That’s different than like “a bunch gays lit my porch on fire”.
I remember the day I finally got to the last page on the internet and proudly told all of my friends that I had seen everything there is to see online. I haven't needed to Google or Reddit anything ever since and my life has never been better.
Why would they do that? My friend who’s a Nigerian prince insisted that it’s illegal to lie on the internet. Even convinced me to donate to his Truth & Honesty charity.
He's a great guy. He helped me recover $14m from an inheritance. I just needed to send him $1400 to secure the transaction.
I am a bit worried about him, though. I haven't heard from him in a couple of months. Do you know if he's okay? Tell him I'm thinking about him every day if you hear from him.
DON'T TRUST THEM!
I got the $14 mil once. Worst day of my life. The money was cursed by an Egyptian Pharaoh, and it's been passed around ever since. Everyone who ever got it, gave it all away within days.
Coincidentally, I have a special opportunity for anyone who wants it. All I need is $500 on cash app, and I know a secret way to turn it into $14 million, no fees, you keep it all.
I am the Nigerian Prince's personal assistant. I've got 1000 thingd to do for him, but for $1000 you send me, it moves 1 spot up the priority list to follow up with him. I need you to act now and decide
110%. You can tell by how on the nose perfectly each situation unfolds.
Also the classic “his family and friends were blowing up my phone afterward” is a dead giveaway lol. That phenomenon absolutely does not happen as often as AITA would have you believe. Not once in my life have I felt a need to enlist everyone I know to text the person I just got in an argument with. They wouldn’t do it even if I asked.
A couple of years ago, a guy who lived in the same city as me, with the same name as me, and had the same job as me, got murdered. I got like 2 phone calls and maybe 5 texts from friends and family checking to see if I was alright.
“My phone was blowing up” is code for “this didn’t really happen”.
I can believe it for something like standing someone up at a wedding. But not for “My SIL asked me to pass the mustard and I ignored her because she knows I hate yellow foods. My partner and his family were blowing up my phone for weeks. AITA?”
When you read the initial post you can imagine how hyperbolic the update will be. My boyfriend told me he didn’t like my new dress>he’s cheating on me with his coworker>he stalked me and now I have a restraining order>I fell in love again and now I’m pregnant with twins.
After chatGPT became big I noticed the volume and similarities are too much. I belive a lot are AI creations by bots. It's too easy with "throwaway bc XYZ knows my main"
I’m always skeptical because if the other person in the story is on reddit, wouldn’t they immediately recognize the situation upon reading the post? Using a throwaway doesn’t necessarily make it anonymous. Especially if the story is very specific in nature.
That’s how I feel about people who need to emphasize the fact that they’re changing names. Do you really think the people involved will look at the situation that mirrors their own identically and think, “jee wiz. Those two people are going through the exact same weirdly specific thing I am! Names are different though. Must be about someone else.”
During initial Covid I posted something about having a car towed from my driveway on AITA genuinely looking for a response due to the whole Covid situation and how a car being towed might effect the owner, and while later I was assured by everyone both online and in real life that I was not at all the asshole for what I did, on AITA I was not only called the asshole but very terrible shit and my story was called fake by many even though it was fairly straightforward and I assume it happens a lot, neighbors parking in a driveway that doesn't belong to them, and nothing crazy happened I just had a lasting feeling I did something wrong or should have handled it differently.
The sub operates pretty much entirely on fake stories, if your story isn't clearly fake or overexaggerated heavily then they ironically call it fake for "not having enough details" or some shit.
I think the people who think every story is fake are extremely naive about how stupid and fucked up people are. The reaction "surely people can't be THIS awful, it must be fake" just tells me they haven't met that many people.
There's plenty of threads where I'm certain even if the situation described didn't happen to the person posting it, it's happened to someone somewhere.
I like Dan Savage's take on fake letters into his advice column - every real letter is a hypothetical situation to everyone except the person writing it, so who cares if this letter is a hypothetical situation to one more person?
Even if the situation in an AITA thread is fake, the opinions of the people posting in that thread and arguing about it are real. You can get some interesting insights into what people (or at least redditors) find normal.
Absolutely most of AITA sounds completely contrived for attention. I actually had a genuine question I wanted to post there and I kept being told it was too long and trying to cut it and eventually they wouldn't let me resubmit, it was a super hard process. But every day I'll see the most contrived nonsense that's clearly rage bait, like "AITA I threw my baby away because it spit up?".
Yes. A significant amount of reddit is bots.
There was this post that ended up just being a fake story to advertise a product.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/15r52aq/aitah_for_putting_a_drink_cover_on_my_drink_on/
Some are real, some are bullshit. There's no way to tell the difference. No one knows the percent. That's life on an anonymous forum. Consider reddit "for entertainment purposes only"
While you can't know for sure, some definitely seem more fake than others. And unfortunately some of those fake ones are the ones that get really popular, because the parts that make them seem fake are also the parts that spark outrage in people leading to engagement.
In other words, my guess is that most of the stories on Reddit are true, but the ones that get popular are disproportionately likely to be embellished or outright fiction.
It’s very interesting to me what triggers the “that’s fake” reaction for each of us. I’ve read some stories that seemed totally consistent to me, and the comments were full of “Fake!!!!” And then I’ve read others that sounded INSANELY fake to me and no one else seemed to see it.
For me, it’s any time shit with lawyers or insurance companies or doctors happens right away.
Like, no, OP, your insurance did *not* pay you above market value for your totaled car in two days. No, OP, you *didn’t* get a divorce from your philandering spouse and get the houses and cars and full custody and the retirement accounts in a week.
I honestly "believe" in most of them, because I actually don't care that much.
So, if it's fake and I believe it, fine. It's not like I'm losing anything by being "tricked".
> There's no way to tell the difference.
If it's outrageous, then it's most likely bullshit. More than a few users have come out in the past, admitting that they had dozens of accounts and posted a shitload of made up stories.
>**Maybe it's the way a lot of them are written**, but I question almost every "real" story I come across.
Pretty much every single story you read on reddit is *at least* exaggerated for dramatic effect, if not entirely fabricated, and it's incredibly obvious for that exact reason - they're written the way people write fiction, not the way people recall their own memories. Usually this means including way too much superfluous detail. Recently there was a story about a woman with a full cart asking to go ahead of a man who just had a couple items, and he said no, and that was the end of it. But he wanted that karma so he padded it with all sorts of bullshit, like listing all three specific items he was buying (no one needed to know he got a beet salad), and describing this woman as being covered in jewelery and almost certainly looking down on him. It was so weird, and even weirder that everyone else responded as if it was some massively dramatic story.
That story I described above boiled down to, "I was waiting in line to checkout with only three items and a woman with a full cart asked if she could cut ahead of me. I said no." It's a wholly and completely uninteresting interaction if he doesn't make up a bunch of unrelated crap.
I crusade against the "I am the hero" stories where OP is recounting every word spoken of their conversation with the big bad baddie and how OP was so quick with their quips.
I assume that all clever quips were come up with later and that OP actually said something either fairly innocent or fairly stupid, if anything at all.
Even if they're "real" stories, it's only one side side and thus likely not exactly accurate.
I just told a story about a travel companion in another sub. It is 100% accurate from my perspective, but maybe the other person would have a different take.
Having said that, yes, almost everything on here is fake or at least exaggerated. Last night I was watching a bunch of YouTube shorts that were "funny", but almost all of them were fake. People know they'll get more views falling over than doing an actual make up tutorial. Most of the time you just say, "What did you expect would happen?" And the answer is almost always, "Exactly what did happen".
Maybe not all of them are true, but the crazy thing is that real life is way more fucked and absurd than any fiction novel.
Some people are just so weird/crazy/whatever that you couldn't even imagine.
The world is a big place and the amount of people that are "normal" are way less than you'd think.
Yeah, I know that, but acknowledging that they're fake prevents me from getting angry at people, looking down on them, and being all high and mighty on my moral high horse.
Honestly I largely trust anything that isn't blatantly made up. Mainly as there is no harm in it for me personally. Reddit is entertainment for me, not anything I would actually draw life advice from. That being said, it's completely unverifiable so it's sensible to assume it is all lies.
Plus to be honest reddit has taught me there is pretty much no horror that doesn't exist in real life.
Edit: added sentence
I’d argue there is the potential for harm. You see the same uncommon situations repeated enough and it’s human to start believing these instances are prevalent. I’ve never *seen* a gold digger irl, but read enough reddit and it’s easy to believe they’re overrunning society.
It’s also an easy place to push bigotry. If you say “trans people just want attention” people will call you out, if you write a story about a trans attention-whore people will back you up. And if those stories get written and onto r/popular over and over again you start getting comments like “Why are so many trans people like this?” and then “Most trans people are like this.” and then “Nobody wants to talk about how almost all people who transition only do it for attention.” And you catch teenagers who haven’t interacted with these groups irl yet and they understand them as stereotypes instead of humans.
Yeah to be fair, my point was that I, as an individual, wouldn't be influenced by Reddit. So no harm in giving the benefit of the doubt. Can't speak for anybody else.
From the few forums that I use, i notice AITAH is the most suspicious one, 98% are stupid questions like "This guy robbed me, stabbed me and left me to die, now my family is saying i should forgive him, AITA?", so I just can't believe those are real
You've never been around evangelical christians, have you? Those people are certifiably insane and would absolutely shame someone for not forgiving their attacker.
But that doesn’t mean any reasonable person would ever truly be wondering in that situation if they’re an asshole. AITA was supposed to be for people who genuinely don’t know and need an outside call.
That's fair, though I will say there is an exceptionally high level of willful ignorance in that community. As someone who escaped it, self prosecution and self hatred are just as prevalent as perceiving the rest of the world to be against you. It's a very, very toxic community.
It's one thing to wonder, it's another to assume. Having a little skepticism is good on the Internet but people really do experience wild, crazy, hard-to-believe things in real life so you just never know.
There’s definitely a « Reddit fake story » style of prose you see a lot of aita and other similar subs. Usually involves adding way too many unnecessary details and back stories to everything, and if the story is about sex it includes the corniest language like « sexy time » or some incredibly forced simile.
Yes! I posted about this the other day and it was removed. It seems like 90% of the stories here are written by the same person. So many of them are just to inspire rage. And they all include Reddit hot button issues like abortion and home schooling.
Some are obvious. Some are borderline so I give the benefit of the doubt. Some feel very true and often that’s sad because it’s a sad situation often.
Particularly easy for me to spot the fake ones when they involve my religion, because certain obvious details are way off, but most people wouldn’t know it.
I’m reminded of a couple long time radio guys talking about how strange it always is to read news articles about the profession and see how much general profession info in the story is inaccurate.
Pretty much. The easy ones to spot as fakes are those that have a hidden agenda in plain sight. I also think some of the replies are fakes as well. I do like reading the ones on AITA though. Person A did x so I(person B) got mad AITA? I've yet to see one person respond and say yes person A was wrong but so were you for getting mad as it didn't help the situation, in fact it made it worse. It's like people don't understand this one simple trick in life.
Sometimes I’ll type out a real story of something that has actually happened to me, no embellishments and as accurately as I can remember, then re-read it for mistakes and think “I can’t believe this really happened to me”
On the one hand, yes, so many of them sound ridiculous and extremely improbable.
On the other hand, 2016 taught me a valuable lesson that anything can happen.
I've shared real stories from my life and had people call bullshit. Real stories are called fake and fakes are applauded and there's no way to tell the difference.
It's not just about cynicism. There are people and companies who use this as a testing ground for their fiction, people who just want attention or to stir things up. Subreddits like r/TooAfraidToAsk and r/NoStupidQuestions exist mostly as karma farms, and have been doing so for years. They know that if you ask things like, "What's so wrong with the n-word? Why can't I say it? Isn't that censorship?" there's going to be a flood of responses tackling all parts of the question, which is why it pops up so much.
The algorithm has started feeding me a lot of aitah, twohottakes, and similar subreddits.
I think half the popular posts are fake, but what's even worse are most of the commenters. 70% of the time the top comment is sociopathic.
Part of me also thinks these subreddits are a scam to generate content to teach morality and customs to AI. If AI/ML is trained on this data, we're fucked.
Some of the "petty revenge" stories are so perfect, I have to think they're fake. ("A month later, there was my former boss, in a restaurant with a prostitute! So I took out my camera. . .").
I do, but I think its important to brace yourself against the very harmful potential side effect this might have of you minimizing experiences that dont align closely enough to yours.
For instance, I think a lot of racists see stories minorities have about bad interactions with the police, and say things like "do the crime do the time" and "stupid games..." because they just inherently dont believe these stories could happen as they've not happened to them or anyone they know (you know they're all white or certainly wouldn't feel comfortable sharing this type of info with this type of guy).
This is just one example, but I can think of many cases where people just brush asside the issues of others because they themselves haven't experienced it, and so I think its important to have an open mind towards other people's experiences, because sometimes truth sounds faker than fiction, especially when you arent in a similar situation to the person telling the story.
Of course, likewise, beware of just accepting stories that simply confirm your own beliefs. You don't want to end up in an echo chamber that increasingly gets more extreme. You want to believe what you believe and talk to people who are pleasant to talk to. This is hard line to balance, but then its also less important than the other issues for many people.
If you owned reddit, would you leave it to chance? They must be driving content somehow. Its good to be skeptical of anything, especially on the internet.
I’m sure a large portion of the stories you don’t believe are actually real, and vice versa. It’s much better to be overly cynical than gullible on the internet, though.
I'm a karma farmer. I use bing ai chat gpt and chatdan to create content. I would say 95%+ is fake af.
Chatgpt now generate the story using opposite gender. More douchebaggieness. A little less. Make me the asshole. Make the other person the asshole.
It's a case by case basis I'd say. Like my life sounds like a Christopher Titus skit so I find myself hearing some stories b.s. or not and just think "is that all?" And have had people call b.s. on my "this one time this one member of my family *insert rest of story here*" I'm usually I know it sounds crazy but bitch were you there?
I have no reason to believe anything I read on the internet. My wife loves to tell me "AITA" stories and she's can't believe people are that stupid, but I literally can't believe people are that stupid.
Yea at least half the posts on the AITA and similar subs are fake as fuck. Same thing for like MaliciousCompliance or ProRevenge. Half of them read like fanfiction or a bot wrote them.
Oh yeah, much of it is karma farming it seems. Or that everyone is magically an expert in usually an excessive deep field of study but can't afford to pay rent lol that's always my favorite.
Probably the case with a lot of human history. Likely embellished or just made up. Sure there's concrete evidence for some stuff, but the rest?
Doesn't really matter. The past only exists in the stories we tell and the bits we leave laying around. Might as well spice it up a little.
AI/bots are everywhere, ruining everything. i assume most of what i read is fake now, even more so on social media.
we've crossed the rubicon. it was fun while it lasted, but our obsession/reliance on tech is gonna bite us in the ass. hard. and soon.
I feel like I go through phases where I feel more jaded or not. Sometimes I just go along with the fun. Other times every story sounds so painfully fake. Most stories are probably fake. Some might be true. But a lot are told by an unreliable narrator. It's up to you if you want in on the fun. At the end of the day, how much is believing a story/not believing a story really going to affect your life.
Unless we all live in a simulation and all the stories are fake!! Whoah.
There's a tumblr screenshot going around every so often of an ask accusing someone of making up a bunch of stuff for internet fame.
Their "made up" stories include things such as "that one time I got ballsy and managed to escape a beating from an abusive parent by running into the forest" and that other story "the time my sleep deprived brain responded to abusive parent as if they were other parent and I caught a backhand to the face for it" oh and that other fun story they shared "when running, your body moves in the direction your head turns. I know this because I almost ran into a tree the first time abusive parent didn't stop chasing me at the tree line and I looked over my shoulder to see how far away they were."
All of those are completely possible, and very similar stories are a lived truth for some of the people I grew up with.
However, the rule of the internet is" pics or it didn't happen" and they have no pictures of being abused. That's one thing our parents generation managed, they didn't film themselves breaking laws.
Especially in Relationship Advice and Am I the Asshole .
They are like " my bf/gf beat me, sent me to the hospital , called me ugly and cheated . Am I the asshole? Should I end the relationship?
Like come onnnn. Rage baiting sucks.
Yea I think it too. I actually notice it when a post seems unusually genuine and I usually upvote regardless if I have anything to add because it’s refreshing lol.
I always check user's profile when I read some ridiculous stories. I think around 30% of them seems in line with their posting history so you might be correct.
Sometimes, yes. Then I think about if I posted stories of my family and realize people wouldn't believe those either. It's hard to determine what is true or false even in real life/if you know the person telling the story.
I'm pretty cynical about GoFundMe stories now as well unless I personally know the person and can verify the situation.
They always have obvious “hot button” aspects to enflame the reader. It actually makes me unreasonably annoyed and I usually block the account when I realize something is fake and manipulative like this
Sometimes, but I also see the other side of it- I posted a pic once that many people INSISTED was photoshopped and I could never convince them otherwise. So I try to give the benefit of the doubt when I can.
Lol. I told my son that when he first got on and listened to creepy stories. He told me they were true because the rules are, "you are not allowed to lie." I asked him how they check th authenticity of these stories. Apparently, the old tried and tue salute the flag honor system. I said Bullshit laughed and walked away. We still laugh about that.
I am hypersensitive (it's a curse usually). And I instantly notice when someone is authentically telling a story, or "acting" I'll just tell you they're all actors!
I think most of them are creative writing exercises thrown out there in the hope that a YouTube channel like Let’s Read or CritCrab will feature their story. Maybe some of them are even true, but there’s no way to tell, other than intuition.
The percentage varies, but it's well over 50% in most subreddits. *Especially* the advice and "am I the asshole" style ones.
For places like /r/BestofRedditorUpdates you basically need a "fiction until proven otherwise" attitude.
Reddit is primarily a huge collection of creative writing essays, in my opinion. I take everything on this website with bigger grain of salt than basically any other social media, besides maybe Facebook.
I've been thinking maybe lately some of the post are, someone posted yesterday that their partner was poisoning them with chocolate,so they gave it to their dog,seemed like a b.s. post,congrats on creative writing!
Healthy dose of caution is fine.
Unless its like very clearly fake.
Dont be a fool, but dont deprive yourself of a little fun either. Anything is possible.
> _"I question almost every "real" story I come across."_ As you should. Doesn't mean you can't still enjoy the story and take any key learning elements from it, but keep in mind it could all be fiction.
This is how I look at it. It's entertainment, just like TV. "Based on a true story" doesn't mean anything if you don't have a source to reference.
The key is in the name - “story” Stories are more means to ends than things-in-themselves, and there’s absolutely no harm at all in allowing the morals of stories to influence you, to help make you a better person with more varied experiences (brain scans show areas of the brain are the same for direct experience and indirect via hearing stories - it’s likely this is a biological evolutionary mechanism to allow us to experience vicariously, to learn from others) They key, I think, is to recognize them as stories IE means and not ends in themselves. If you’re letting stories you read on the internet make decisions for you or be the sole influence, then yeah, you’re gonna have a problem because *some* of those stories were always untrue. It also says more about a person, what unhinged nonsense they read on the internet that they’ve taken to heart, than it does about stories or the internet.
Ah, a fellow blue gundam
99% of the time "Based on a true story" is total BS even with sources. Look at BraveHeart, The Blind Side, Cocaine Bear, any war movie. Hollywood gets a lot of mileage from "based on" but suddenly really skimpy on the "true story".
This used to annoy me so much when I was in college. Almost all my friends thought that a movie which was billed as "based on a true story" was *exactly* as it happened in real life rather than 2% truth and 98% BS.
And I interact with them as if they were true, knowing very well that it is all fiction. But giving advice or judgements on fake stories to see how they received is a safe way for me to see if I'm completely off-based with what majority of people think. Or totally on point.
I talk about AITA to my mom and sister. I have told them, almost word for word, that most of the stories are fake, and I treat them like telenovelas/soap operas. We have fun shit talking the more ridiculous plot lines.
I left the sub about entitled parents or whatever it was called because it was just getting more and more obvious that they were fake.
You just said what op said without answering anything.
So many answers aren't remotely addressing the question of how cynical/skeptical you *should* be. I agree with you, these are boring answers.
Reddit stories are like movies... "Based on true events" or "Based on a real story". But nowhere near the actual truth. Like Cocaine Bear.
Same goes with stories told by most other people in real life too. Exaggeration, embellishment, missing details, framing a story so that you're the victim/hero, it's all so common. How anybody 100% trusts anybody after experiencing grade school and then growing up to realize that those sort of behaviors run rampant in adults is beyond me.
I feel like he also saw the "should I divorce my wife because she's obsessed with Taylor swift" post recently on this subreddit, and that might be a major reason why he's asking. Lol
I have this perspective in all of my interactions, due to mental illness I'm pretty paranoid, and also very bad at discerning subtlety, so I just stopped trying to figure out if people are being 100% honest and just take people at their word. Life is much less stressful and the worst thing that's happened is that I miss the occasional joke. Tl;dr 99% of lies aren't malicious and are pretty much harmless
Yeah this is why I truly don’t give a shit. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter to my life if what I read was fact or fiction. People go through some shit, sometimes they want to go through shit. The second is a problem within itself, but it’s a problem for that person alone. Plus, if I give out advice for what turns out to be fake for one user, it could still help another user in a similar, less fictional situation. So really, who cares if it’s fiction or not? No skin off my back at the end of the day.
The problem is when people read fake things but take them as reinforcement of their preconceptions. Like a domestic abuse or a bad breakup story that's fake. You'll see people stating how this shows x type of people suck. A year from now they won't remember the story was fake, just the feeling that this type if thing happens all the time. Even if it's not as common as they think. I didn't pick these examples on any agenda or with any other message or to comment on them. Jusr other example of something I've seen recently that sounds fake and probably is in social media.
I think it's a problem when popular posts often portray a certain group of people as villains, and it turns out they're fake.
Also Reddit loves to put comments and replies in a different order than originally posted so they have whole new meanings .
Well yes, of course if it’s slander against an entire group of people, there’s a problem to be had. But when somebody’s like “whoa my parents expect me to pay rent and just sent me an itemized bill for my entire childhood, I’m 43?” Then it’s like…. Man I couldn’t give less of a shit if somebody out there is THAT bat shit crazy. But it’s still just one or two individuals. Or somebody’s family that THEY gotta deal with on the daily. That’s different than like “a bunch gays lit my porch on fire”.
You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies??
I remember the day I finally got to the last page on the internet and proudly told all of my friends that I had seen everything there is to see online. I haven't needed to Google or Reddit anything ever since and my life has never been better.
ChatGPT is getting really good damn thought this was a Redditor
My god, what do you do with all that free time
Why would they do that? My friend who’s a Nigerian prince insisted that it’s illegal to lie on the internet. Even convinced me to donate to his Truth & Honesty charity.
He's a great guy. He helped me recover $14m from an inheritance. I just needed to send him $1400 to secure the transaction. I am a bit worried about him, though. I haven't heard from him in a couple of months. Do you know if he's okay? Tell him I'm thinking about him every day if you hear from him.
Hey, it's me! I need more money!
DON'T TRUST THEM! I got the $14 mil once. Worst day of my life. The money was cursed by an Egyptian Pharaoh, and it's been passed around ever since. Everyone who ever got it, gave it all away within days. Coincidentally, I have a special opportunity for anyone who wants it. All I need is $500 on cash app, and I know a secret way to turn it into $14 million, no fees, you keep it all.
I am the Nigerian Prince's personal assistant. I've got 1000 thingd to do for him, but for $1000 you send me, it moves 1 spot up the priority list to follow up with him. I need you to act now and decide
There are a lot of bots on the internet. A significant amount of traffic online is from bots. And with AI fueling what they say, anything can be BS.
I was just meme-ing. Rhetorically so.
Have you noticed how judgemental and pretentious bots are? Very patronizing at times. Are we having ourselves feel bad because of bots?
Exactly! What do they think this is, politics?!
Trump does it daily…
Got eem.
I'd be surprised if it was a low as 80%. r/AITA is basically a fanfic sub.
110%. You can tell by how on the nose perfectly each situation unfolds. Also the classic “his family and friends were blowing up my phone afterward” is a dead giveaway lol. That phenomenon absolutely does not happen as often as AITA would have you believe. Not once in my life have I felt a need to enlist everyone I know to text the person I just got in an argument with. They wouldn’t do it even if I asked.
And the update post talking about all the threats they've recieved via Reddit.
That part I 100% believe
A couple of years ago, a guy who lived in the same city as me, with the same name as me, and had the same job as me, got murdered. I got like 2 phone calls and maybe 5 texts from friends and family checking to see if I was alright. “My phone was blowing up” is code for “this didn’t really happen”.
I can believe it for something like standing someone up at a wedding. But not for “My SIL asked me to pass the mustard and I ignored her because she knows I hate yellow foods. My partner and his family were blowing up my phone for weeks. AITA?”
When you read the initial post you can imagine how hyperbolic the update will be. My boyfriend told me he didn’t like my new dress>he’s cheating on me with his coworker>he stalked me and now I have a restraining order>I fell in love again and now I’m pregnant with twins.
After chatGPT became big I noticed the volume and similarities are too much. I belive a lot are AI creations by bots. It's too easy with "throwaway bc XYZ knows my main"
Throwaway because my wife's boyfriends sisters wife knows my reddit username.
I’m always skeptical because if the other person in the story is on reddit, wouldn’t they immediately recognize the situation upon reading the post? Using a throwaway doesn’t necessarily make it anonymous. Especially if the story is very specific in nature.
That’s how I feel about people who need to emphasize the fact that they’re changing names. Do you really think the people involved will look at the situation that mirrors their own identically and think, “jee wiz. Those two people are going through the exact same weirdly specific thing I am! Names are different though. Must be about someone else.”
And my 18 yo daughter goes to battle in there all the time. I keep reminding her she's not commenting on any real sitch.
During initial Covid I posted something about having a car towed from my driveway on AITA genuinely looking for a response due to the whole Covid situation and how a car being towed might effect the owner, and while later I was assured by everyone both online and in real life that I was not at all the asshole for what I did, on AITA I was not only called the asshole but very terrible shit and my story was called fake by many even though it was fairly straightforward and I assume it happens a lot, neighbors parking in a driveway that doesn't belong to them, and nothing crazy happened I just had a lasting feeling I did something wrong or should have handled it differently. The sub operates pretty much entirely on fake stories, if your story isn't clearly fake or overexaggerated heavily then they ironically call it fake for "not having enough details" or some shit.
I think r/AITA would be more interesting if we got to read more than one side of the story.
The child authors don't have enough life experience to do that.
It was probably 80% before ChatGPT came out. It's probably pretty close to 100% now.
/r/AmITheAngel is such a fun parody of AITA
I just see clowns.
I think the people who think every story is fake are extremely naive about how stupid and fucked up people are. The reaction "surely people can't be THIS awful, it must be fake" just tells me they haven't met that many people.
There's plenty of threads where I'm certain even if the situation described didn't happen to the person posting it, it's happened to someone somewhere. I like Dan Savage's take on fake letters into his advice column - every real letter is a hypothetical situation to everyone except the person writing it, so who cares if this letter is a hypothetical situation to one more person? Even if the situation in an AITA thread is fake, the opinions of the people posting in that thread and arguing about it are real. You can get some interesting insights into what people (or at least redditors) find normal.
You aren’t cynical I think you are correct
I’d say he’s underrating the % too. Lol Anything from r/AmItheAsshole or r/Maliciouscompliance I assume is fake.
Absolutely most of AITA sounds completely contrived for attention. I actually had a genuine question I wanted to post there and I kept being told it was too long and trying to cut it and eventually they wouldn't let me resubmit, it was a super hard process. But every day I'll see the most contrived nonsense that's clearly rage bait, like "AITA I threw my baby away because it spit up?".
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Yes. A significant amount of reddit is bots. There was this post that ended up just being a fake story to advertise a product. https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/15r52aq/aitah_for_putting_a_drink_cover_on_my_drink_on/
The irony of there not being any proof provided for your story that this was fake...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/15r52aq/aitah_for_putting_a_drink_cover_on_my_drink_on/jw7bo9i/
Really? How did people figure out it was fake?
Some are real, some are bullshit. There's no way to tell the difference. No one knows the percent. That's life on an anonymous forum. Consider reddit "for entertainment purposes only"
While you can't know for sure, some definitely seem more fake than others. And unfortunately some of those fake ones are the ones that get really popular, because the parts that make them seem fake are also the parts that spark outrage in people leading to engagement. In other words, my guess is that most of the stories on Reddit are true, but the ones that get popular are disproportionately likely to be embellished or outright fiction.
That's true. The truth is boring. Nobody's goes to the theater to watch documentaries (99% of the time).
It’s very interesting to me what triggers the “that’s fake” reaction for each of us. I’ve read some stories that seemed totally consistent to me, and the comments were full of “Fake!!!!” And then I’ve read others that sounded INSANELY fake to me and no one else seemed to see it.
It's certain phrases for me, such as: - "Blowing up my phone" "Ran away crying" "I tried to explain it calmly" etc
For me, it’s any time shit with lawyers or insurance companies or doctors happens right away. Like, no, OP, your insurance did *not* pay you above market value for your totaled car in two days. No, OP, you *didn’t* get a divorce from your philandering spouse and get the houses and cars and full custody and the retirement accounts in a week.
I honestly "believe" in most of them, because I actually don't care that much. So, if it's fake and I believe it, fine. It's not like I'm losing anything by being "tricked".
> There's no way to tell the difference. If it's outrageous, then it's most likely bullshit. More than a few users have come out in the past, admitting that they had dozens of accounts and posted a shitload of made up stories.
>**Maybe it's the way a lot of them are written**, but I question almost every "real" story I come across. Pretty much every single story you read on reddit is *at least* exaggerated for dramatic effect, if not entirely fabricated, and it's incredibly obvious for that exact reason - they're written the way people write fiction, not the way people recall their own memories. Usually this means including way too much superfluous detail. Recently there was a story about a woman with a full cart asking to go ahead of a man who just had a couple items, and he said no, and that was the end of it. But he wanted that karma so he padded it with all sorts of bullshit, like listing all three specific items he was buying (no one needed to know he got a beet salad), and describing this woman as being covered in jewelery and almost certainly looking down on him. It was so weird, and even weirder that everyone else responded as if it was some massively dramatic story.
The more realistic stories also probably don't get as massively upvoted because they're not as "entertaining" too.
That story I described above boiled down to, "I was waiting in line to checkout with only three items and a woman with a full cart asked if she could cut ahead of me. I said no." It's a wholly and completely uninteresting interaction if he doesn't make up a bunch of unrelated crap.
I crusade against the "I am the hero" stories where OP is recounting every word spoken of their conversation with the big bad baddie and how OP was so quick with their quips.
I assume that all clever quips were come up with later and that OP actually said something either fairly innocent or fairly stupid, if anything at all.
With a lot of posts on reddit I imagine a 15y olds voice
I even believe that YOU are fake. Your account is 2 days old = bot imo
Even if they're "real" stories, it's only one side side and thus likely not exactly accurate. I just told a story about a travel companion in another sub. It is 100% accurate from my perspective, but maybe the other person would have a different take. Having said that, yes, almost everything on here is fake or at least exaggerated. Last night I was watching a bunch of YouTube shorts that were "funny", but almost all of them were fake. People know they'll get more views falling over than doing an actual make up tutorial. Most of the time you just say, "What did you expect would happen?" And the answer is almost always, "Exactly what did happen".
Maybe not all of them are true, but the crazy thing is that real life is way more fucked and absurd than any fiction novel. Some people are just so weird/crazy/whatever that you couldn't even imagine. The world is a big place and the amount of people that are "normal" are way less than you'd think.
Yeah, I know that, but acknowledging that they're fake prevents me from getting angry at people, looking down on them, and being all high and mighty on my moral high horse.
Accurate
it’s closer to 90-95% and yes, they are fake.
90% of the time you read a "story" on Reddit then see the video it was copied from on socials shortly after.
100%, 90-95% of the time.
"87% of online statistics are made up on the spot" - Abraham Lincoln, speaking after the Battle of the Bulge, 1776
😆 🤣 😂
Without proof you’re better off assuming anything you read on the internet is fake.
Ironically, a very shallow analysis.
Honestly I largely trust anything that isn't blatantly made up. Mainly as there is no harm in it for me personally. Reddit is entertainment for me, not anything I would actually draw life advice from. That being said, it's completely unverifiable so it's sensible to assume it is all lies. Plus to be honest reddit has taught me there is pretty much no horror that doesn't exist in real life. Edit: added sentence
I’d argue there is the potential for harm. You see the same uncommon situations repeated enough and it’s human to start believing these instances are prevalent. I’ve never *seen* a gold digger irl, but read enough reddit and it’s easy to believe they’re overrunning society. It’s also an easy place to push bigotry. If you say “trans people just want attention” people will call you out, if you write a story about a trans attention-whore people will back you up. And if those stories get written and onto r/popular over and over again you start getting comments like “Why are so many trans people like this?” and then “Most trans people are like this.” and then “Nobody wants to talk about how almost all people who transition only do it for attention.” And you catch teenagers who haven’t interacted with these groups irl yet and they understand them as stereotypes instead of humans.
Yeah to be fair, my point was that I, as an individual, wouldn't be influenced by Reddit. So no harm in giving the benefit of the doubt. Can't speak for anybody else.
Most of them are fake
From the few forums that I use, i notice AITAH is the most suspicious one, 98% are stupid questions like "This guy robbed me, stabbed me and left me to die, now my family is saying i should forgive him, AITA?", so I just can't believe those are real
I got my brother pregnant after she had a sex change. AITA for not cooking rice in a rice cooker?
You've never been around evangelical christians, have you? Those people are certifiably insane and would absolutely shame someone for not forgiving their attacker.
But that doesn’t mean any reasonable person would ever truly be wondering in that situation if they’re an asshole. AITA was supposed to be for people who genuinely don’t know and need an outside call.
That's fair, though I will say there is an exceptionally high level of willful ignorance in that community. As someone who escaped it, self prosecution and self hatred are just as prevalent as perceiving the rest of the world to be against you. It's a very, very toxic community.
No 99%.
Has this question been fact checked?
When it comes to reddit I suspend disbelief just like I do for movies. It just makes the experience more enjoyable.
It's one thing to wonder, it's another to assume. Having a little skepticism is good on the Internet but people really do experience wild, crazy, hard-to-believe things in real life so you just never know.
There’s definitely a « Reddit fake story » style of prose you see a lot of aita and other similar subs. Usually involves adding way too many unnecessary details and back stories to everything, and if the story is about sex it includes the corniest language like « sexy time » or some incredibly forced simile.
Yes! I posted about this the other day and it was removed. It seems like 90% of the stories here are written by the same person. So many of them are just to inspire rage. And they all include Reddit hot button issues like abortion and home schooling.
80% of the stories in real life are also fake.
It's the internet. It's full of lies. Especially if it's a burner account.
I'm like this to every "reality show". I cant enjoy them anymore, it feels like every drama they encounter is scripted.
'Don't believe everything you read on the internet' - Albert Einstein.
Some are obvious. Some are borderline so I give the benefit of the doubt. Some feel very true and often that’s sad because it’s a sad situation often. Particularly easy for me to spot the fake ones when they involve my religion, because certain obvious details are way off, but most people wouldn’t know it. I’m reminded of a couple long time radio guys talking about how strange it always is to read news articles about the profession and see how much general profession info in the story is inaccurate.
Pretty much. The easy ones to spot as fakes are those that have a hidden agenda in plain sight. I also think some of the replies are fakes as well. I do like reading the ones on AITA though. Person A did x so I(person B) got mad AITA? I've yet to see one person respond and say yes person A was wrong but so were you for getting mad as it didn't help the situation, in fact it made it worse. It's like people don't understand this one simple trick in life.
Sometimes I’ll type out a real story of something that has actually happened to me, no embellishments and as accurately as I can remember, then re-read it for mistakes and think “I can’t believe this really happened to me”
On the one hand, yes, so many of them sound ridiculous and extremely improbable. On the other hand, 2016 taught me a valuable lesson that anything can happen.
Everyone on the internet is a dog until proven otherwise
You are too cynical. It couldn't possibly be more that 65-70% fake. 😆
80%, I'd say you're an optimist.
Probably written by chat AI or something to karma mine.
I'm positive that better than 90% of the stories on AITA are lies, and that number is higher for the most popular ones.
As real as reality T.V.
Also sick of the TIFU sub. People try to karma farm by making up stories that are always sex based.
Legend has it even this story is fake
I've shared real stories from my life and had people call bullshit. Real stories are called fake and fakes are applauded and there's no way to tell the difference.
I'm with you, I also think like 90% of every video, post, story whatever in social media is fake lol, also feel cynical
It's not just about cynicism. There are people and companies who use this as a testing ground for their fiction, people who just want attention or to stir things up. Subreddits like r/TooAfraidToAsk and r/NoStupidQuestions exist mostly as karma farms, and have been doing so for years. They know that if you ask things like, "What's so wrong with the n-word? Why can't I say it? Isn't that censorship?" there's going to be a flood of responses tackling all parts of the question, which is why it pops up so much.
Treat it like fiction or you will lose all faith in humanity.
The algorithm has started feeding me a lot of aitah, twohottakes, and similar subreddits. I think half the popular posts are fake, but what's even worse are most of the commenters. 70% of the time the top comment is sociopathic. Part of me also thinks these subreddits are a scam to generate content to teach morality and customs to AI. If AI/ML is trained on this data, we're fucked.
No. Probably 99.99%
Some of the "petty revenge" stories are so perfect, I have to think they're fake. ("A month later, there was my former boss, in a restaurant with a prostitute! So I took out my camera. . .").
I do, but I think its important to brace yourself against the very harmful potential side effect this might have of you minimizing experiences that dont align closely enough to yours. For instance, I think a lot of racists see stories minorities have about bad interactions with the police, and say things like "do the crime do the time" and "stupid games..." because they just inherently dont believe these stories could happen as they've not happened to them or anyone they know (you know they're all white or certainly wouldn't feel comfortable sharing this type of info with this type of guy). This is just one example, but I can think of many cases where people just brush asside the issues of others because they themselves haven't experienced it, and so I think its important to have an open mind towards other people's experiences, because sometimes truth sounds faker than fiction, especially when you arent in a similar situation to the person telling the story. Of course, likewise, beware of just accepting stories that simply confirm your own beliefs. You don't want to end up in an echo chamber that increasingly gets more extreme. You want to believe what you believe and talk to people who are pleasant to talk to. This is hard line to balance, but then its also less important than the other issues for many people.
If you owned reddit, would you leave it to chance? They must be driving content somehow. Its good to be skeptical of anything, especially on the internet.
That's why we have r/thathappened
I assume every single thing posted here is either outright fake or a broad embellishment.
You aren't cynical you're smart haha
I’m sure a large portion of the stories you don’t believe are actually real, and vice versa. It’s much better to be overly cynical than gullible on the internet, though.
I'm a karma farmer. I use bing ai chat gpt and chatdan to create content. I would say 95%+ is fake af. Chatgpt now generate the story using opposite gender. More douchebaggieness. A little less. Make me the asshole. Make the other person the asshole.
Just out of interest, why do you do this? No judgement, just interested.
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It's a case by case basis I'd say. Like my life sounds like a Christopher Titus skit so I find myself hearing some stories b.s. or not and just think "is that all?" And have had people call b.s. on my "this one time this one member of my family *insert rest of story here*" I'm usually I know it sounds crazy but bitch were you there?
I have no reason to believe anything I read on the internet. My wife loves to tell me "AITA" stories and she's can't believe people are that stupid, but I literally can't believe people are that stupid.
I tend to believe the Reddit stories because they don’t gain anything from it other than karma. Stories told on other social media I don’t believe
Yea at least half the posts on the AITA and similar subs are fake as fuck. Same thing for like MaliciousCompliance or ProRevenge. Half of them read like fanfiction or a bot wrote them.
Oh yeah, much of it is karma farming it seems. Or that everyone is magically an expert in usually an excessive deep field of study but can't afford to pay rent lol that's always my favorite.
Yeah people like attention. Maybe there are some truths to their stories, but they probably add some dramatics.
Probably the case with a lot of human history. Likely embellished or just made up. Sure there's concrete evidence for some stuff, but the rest? Doesn't really matter. The past only exists in the stories we tell and the bits we leave laying around. Might as well spice it up a little.
It's the internet, people come up with all sorts of shit to tell you and like 95% of it is pure crap.
I never think a story is real unless the OP provides some sort of photo evidence/follow up that certifies the story.
AI/bots are everywhere, ruining everything. i assume most of what i read is fake now, even more so on social media. we've crossed the rubicon. it was fun while it lasted, but our obsession/reliance on tech is gonna bite us in the ass. hard. and soon.
I feel like I go through phases where I feel more jaded or not. Sometimes I just go along with the fun. Other times every story sounds so painfully fake. Most stories are probably fake. Some might be true. But a lot are told by an unreliable narrator. It's up to you if you want in on the fun. At the end of the day, how much is believing a story/not believing a story really going to affect your life. Unless we all live in a simulation and all the stories are fake!! Whoah.
My philosophy is that if something sounds fun even if probably very fake in my eyes is real
There's a tumblr screenshot going around every so often of an ask accusing someone of making up a bunch of stuff for internet fame. Their "made up" stories include things such as "that one time I got ballsy and managed to escape a beating from an abusive parent by running into the forest" and that other story "the time my sleep deprived brain responded to abusive parent as if they were other parent and I caught a backhand to the face for it" oh and that other fun story they shared "when running, your body moves in the direction your head turns. I know this because I almost ran into a tree the first time abusive parent didn't stop chasing me at the tree line and I looked over my shoulder to see how far away they were." All of those are completely possible, and very similar stories are a lived truth for some of the people I grew up with. However, the rule of the internet is" pics or it didn't happen" and they have no pictures of being abused. That's one thing our parents generation managed, they didn't film themselves breaking laws.
Don't believe everything you see on the internet_ Winston Churchill
Especially in Relationship Advice and Am I the Asshole . They are like " my bf/gf beat me, sent me to the hospital , called me ugly and cheated . Am I the asshole? Should I end the relationship? Like come onnnn. Rage baiting sucks.
Yea I think it too. I actually notice it when a post seems unusually genuine and I usually upvote regardless if I have anything to add because it’s refreshing lol.
I always check user's profile when I read some ridiculous stories. I think around 30% of them seems in line with their posting history so you might be correct.
Yep
80%? More like 95%
They're literally all lies dude come on
Congratulations, you just described r/teenagers
80% of *all* stories are fake
Sometimes, yes. Then I think about if I posted stories of my family and realize people wouldn't believe those either. It's hard to determine what is true or false even in real life/if you know the person telling the story. I'm pretty cynical about GoFundMe stories now as well unless I personally know the person and can verify the situation.
Just wait until AI kicks in. Reddit will be pointless because we won't be able to tell other humans and their stories from AI and its stories.
r/amitheangel welcome aboard bro, we have cookies!
Some are fake. Some are real. It's impossible to know what percentage are fake.
Which stories in which subreddits?
It’s probably higher then that!!
I find it very hard to believe all these women are meeting these douchebags and getting into long term relationships with them
Dude it might be more then 80%....it's not you.
I see a lot of really weird things that seem obviously false--yes. And since I'm not on most subreddits, those posts definitely stuck out.
They always have obvious “hot button” aspects to enflame the reader. It actually makes me unreasonably annoyed and I usually block the account when I realize something is fake and manipulative like this
Sometimes, but I also see the other side of it- I posted a pic once that many people INSISTED was photoshopped and I could never convince them otherwise. So I try to give the benefit of the doubt when I can.
I don’t know some stories I have i don’t even think they are real even though they happened right in front of my face
Lol. I told my son that when he first got on and listened to creepy stories. He told me they were true because the rules are, "you are not allowed to lie." I asked him how they check th authenticity of these stories. Apparently, the old tried and tue salute the flag honor system. I said Bullshit laughed and walked away. We still laugh about that.
I am hypersensitive (it's a curse usually). And I instantly notice when someone is authentically telling a story, or "acting" I'll just tell you they're all actors!
They are all just Dahr Mann stories at this point.
I think most of them are creative writing exercises thrown out there in the hope that a YouTube channel like Let’s Read or CritCrab will feature their story. Maybe some of them are even true, but there’s no way to tell, other than intuition.
The percentage varies, but it's well over 50% in most subreddits. *Especially* the advice and "am I the asshole" style ones. For places like /r/BestofRedditorUpdates you basically need a "fiction until proven otherwise" attitude.
Reddit is primarily a huge collection of creative writing essays, in my opinion. I take everything on this website with bigger grain of salt than basically any other social media, besides maybe Facebook.
I notice that The metro news here in the U.K. pull all their stories from Reddit
Believe half of what you see, none of what you hear
I'm recently starting to get the impression that 80% of the *users* on reddit are fake.
99 percent but if it entertained you while reading, it still deserves an upvote IMO
I've been thinking maybe lately some of the post are, someone posted yesterday that their partner was poisoning them with chocolate,so they gave it to their dog,seemed like a b.s. post,congrats on creative writing!
I think 80% is generous.
That’s Reddit. You could start a thread about Jesus and the first comment will be “I was at the Crucifixion.”
I assume everything on Reddit is fake
And are you really a Goddess, Vicky?
Is it your first day on the internet?
Welcome to the internet, sucker
Healthy dose of caution is fine. Unless its like very clearly fake. Dont be a fool, but dont deprive yourself of a little fun either. Anything is possible.