• TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    Same here. I learned about Flat Earthers, and assumed they were sarcastic, like Birds aren’t Real. Took me two years of occasionally coming across their shit to realize they were serious. I was flabbergasted.

    That’s when I started to understand how stupid people can be. They can be all the stupid, and in unsettling numbers.

  • arin@lemmy.worldBannedEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Me in 2015 reddit in the_Donald Subreddit thought they were shitposting sarcasm but no. It was a coordinated Russian intelligence campaign to fuck with retarded voters

    • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zipEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      It started that way. Then a large contingent of shit stains showed up not realizing it was a joke and agreed with everything.

      • SGforce@lemmy.ca
        1·
        3 months ago

        There was a moderator coup. Reddit admins deliberately flipped it and immediately started banning anyone going “wait…you’re serious?”

  • Darcranium@lemmy.world
    1·
    3 months ago

    This is why in many native cultures they stay away from being sarcastic. They’ve learned that it can be harmful to a society and they have the empathy to not want to make certain people who are out of the loop feel dumb

  • JerkyChew@lemmy.world
    1·
    3 months ago

    There’s a subreddit called TrumpZone or something like that that I joined because of all the over the top bootlicking memes. It took a few days before I realized that the memes weren’t being posted ironically and the members really were batshit crazy.

  • ikt@aussie.zone
    1·
    3 months ago

    wasn’t that 4chan in general, it’s fun to post far right memes and jokes until the actual far right shows up and doesn’t know the difference

    • Serinus@lemmy.world
      1·
      3 months ago

      Mostly started very quickly in 2015.

      I wonder how hard it is to infiltrate and influence an anonymous message board.

    • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      3 months ago

      Pretty much my trajectory for making Nazi jokes. Used to be fun and edgy when I was younger, but once I found out there were actual Nazis these days, it was horrifying.

      I can see why people stick to Roman jokes

      • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        3 months ago

        Yeah, this doesn’t excuse anything, but as a millennial growing up there was this whole trend of “dark humor” and “anti-jokes.” Basically the more fucked up and wrong something was, the funnier it was supposed to be.

        That doesn’t make it okay, but we were just stupid teenagers. You could say we shoulda known better, but at the time that was just the trend. Like skibidi toilet and other brainrot today. Everyone knew it wasn’t serious, that no one could actually mean those jokes.

        At least, we thought we did. It seems as we grew up, we diverged into two main groups. Those who realized how those “jokes” could actually be harmful and grew out of it, and those who started taking the jokes more and more seriously until they started meaning it and it became part of their personalities.

        I think that’s a huge source of disconnect with Gen Z. I don’t think they ever had a concept of dark humor. By the time they reached that age, the trend was more towards acceptance and inclusion, social awareness and non-harmful language. The old “sticks and stones” no longer applied.

        So to early Gen Z, late Millennials probably looked like sociopaths. Especially since we were already on social media, and some of that immature bullshit is indelibly marked on the internet.

        And you can’t just tell them “it was just a joke, we didn’t mean it, it wasn’t serious” because that’s such an alien concept to them.

  • Zexks@lemmy.world
    1·
    3 months ago

    This is why i dont like or support shit posting. FAR TOO MANY people simply can not understand.