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[SolVanderlyn]

Post-truth society.

Article from Geek.com

Of all the great and terrible things about the internet, its ability to shape and rewrite reality might be the most dystopian. History is written by the victors, and every day it looks like the losers are humanity and meaning. In the Metal Gear Solid series, a collection of sinister artificial intelligences manipulate bulk information online to keep the world firmly under their control. A decade ago, I wrote some fan fiction that continues to distort the truth about a knock-off Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Everything you think you know about Street Sharks is a lie.

Here’s how I turned Street Sharks into an ongoing online social experiment.

Years ago, maybe around 2003 when I was in middle school, I stumbled across the site TVTome.com. It was a user-edited wiki for TV shows. To be an editor for the big, popular shows you had to prove why you were qualified. After all, creating the official record of what happened on The Big Bang Theory was an important responsibility. But for some forgotten garbage show like Street Sharks, the screening process was nonexistent. Sensing an opportunity for nonsense, I became the Street Sharks editor and filled its page with lies. I made up characters, voice actors, episodes, plot descriptions, everything.

For a little while, all these falsehoods just sat there, not bothering anybody. However, sometime later, TVTome got bought and integrated into the much bigger CBS Interactive website TV.com. Thanks to that expanded platform, all of my lies rapidly began infecting the rest of the internet. Most sites since have mostly purged themselves of my misinformation, but for years, IMDB, Amazon, and numerous smaller sites were unintentionally hosting my creative writing. If you’re paranoid and trying to spot a fake, pretty much any episode with a specific 1994 air date and episode description is a fraud. If a shady website claims it has streaming videos of “Feelin’ Lobstery” or “Goin’ Clammando,” and a lot still do since I still found these descriptions, it’s lying to you even more than usual. The only place that’s still entirely accurate is Wikipedia, hilariously enough.

More at the link.

Assuming this isn't a super meta level article, this is sort of insane.

Sell me out to TV.com if old.

 

[Machina]

The internet has been weaponized, as well as people's own stupidity.

 

[Oblivion]

Whoa, I remember TVTome.

 

[riotous]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1224150

 

[7DollarHagane]

It's funny that one of the oldest models of online information storing, wikipedia, is the most resilient to this nonsense.

If not enough sources agree, it's clearly stated. If other people have other sources to dispute things, they are free to do so.

It may not be perfect for everything, but I think a wikipedia style approach might serve content aggregators and social media well.

Give users a real ability to shape and put a mark on other peoples content, not just comment on it.

 

[SolVanderlyn]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1224150

Why I didn't think to put Street Sharks in the search bar... I don't know.