13 ms·

Trolling the Entire Internet

442 points by Rudism 10y ago

OJFord 10y ago
Fun read. The article mentions: > “e/n” sites (which was what blogs were sometimes called before the term “blog” had gained wider adoption) Does 'e/n' stand for something? This 1999 post [0] calls it 'Everything and Nothing', but I can't find anything else on it, is that right? It says: > This was probably influenced by the number of EBG-like sites popping up with the words “everything” or “nothing” in their name. EBG? I remember unabbreviated 'weblog' that seems all but gone now, but I've never come across 'e/n site' before. Also, spoiler alert: the domain in question now redirects to a new Github repo with the original site's source. [1] [0] - http://www.hearye.org/1999/05/whats-an-en-site/ http://www.hearye.org/1999/05/whats-an-en-site/ [1] - https://github.com/rudism/NetAuthority https://github.com/rudism/NetAuthority
- fenomas 10y ago
  > Does 'e/n' stand for something? Back when the term was current it was described to me as standing for "entertainment/news". (This was by someone who ran a small e/n site and generally followed the scene - though of course it could still be wrong.)
  - jdalgetty 10y ago
    It was entertainment / news for me.
- salvar 10y ago
  The explanation I read back in the day was that e/n is something that means everything to the person who's writing it, and nothing to everyone else.
  - tawayway 10y ago
    SomethingAwful still has an e/n forum for personal problems
- frikk 10y ago
  I got my start (in programming) building my first e/n site (god has it really been 18 years...). My personal understanding was that "e/n" stood for "everything/nothing". In my case, this was exactly correct. It was a place for my friends to post stupid stuff, a place for me to experiment with css and php, build new "features" just for fun. It was an open playground in a new world. It was a lot of fun. I also just remembered how it was hosted. I became known as the neighborhood kid who collected old computers, so I ended up with a bunch of weird hardware. The site was originally hosted on a 75mhz intel something or another sitting behind a 133mhz linux frankenstein gateway in my bedroom. I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data", when I clearly had the bandwidth logs that showed it wasnt possible! The other cool thing was connecting with other e/n site owners who were also doing their thing. Sometimes you'd collaborate or ping each other's APIs, other times participate in their own experiments. Thousands of little web sites with micro communities built on spaghetti code, almost all have certainly faded away through the various ways that tiny sites die: a web host gets sold, an upstream system upgrade botched but not addressed, a missed payment, an unpatched vulnerability. Maybe today the owner still maintains the domain name out of nostalgia. Shoutout to gyrate.org and sejje.net; Rest in peace, frikk.tk
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    > I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data", when I clearly had the bandwidth logs that showed it wasnt possible! Same here, though probably about a decade later on early versions of mobile data. They still owe me like 15 euros of prepaid, but they're out of business by now.
    - vocatus_gate 10y ago
      > They still owe me like 15 euros of prepaid, but they're out of business by now. Never lose hope.
  - sejje 10y ago
    Hey, frikk. What did you call that little chat box? Shoutbox? You invented twitter, pretty sure.
- scrapcode 10y ago
  I always knew it as entertainment/news
- xd1936 10y ago
  The best definitions I could find: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=e%2Fn http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=e%2Fn
- specialp 10y ago
  It was always everything/nothing. Because back then websites usually had some kind of purpose or category which usually was reflected in the domain name as well. But then sites like Stile Project and others mentioned there came out just talking about whatever the author wanted to rant about (IE the modern internet). So the category was everything and it was about nothing really important.
- dickbasedregex 10y ago
  I had an e/n site in the mid to late 90s with some popularity. I think StileProject probably coined the term. There was a whole group of people who were "internet famous" at the time whose names have been forgotten but I see "derivative work" every day.
  - dickbasedregex 10y ago
    As for the meaning, yes, everything/nothing. Your blog is about everything and nothing. Seinfeld is "a show about nothing."
- ChrisClark 10y ago
  Back when I was reading those e/n sites I knew it as everything/nothing, the sites themselves would call it that too. As in, talking about anything they want, doesn't even have to be important.
- petercooper 10y ago
  everything and nothing. I ran such a site with a few friends in the late 90s/early 00s. Embarrassing proof: http://web.archive.org/web/20000521031551/http://www.thedaytoday.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20000521031551/http://www.thedayt... .. they were basically a genre of pre-blog sites where mostly (but not entirely) 15-25 year old males posted total trash like pictures of celebs they liked, offensive jokes, and, well, total trash :) e/n had a variety of celebs itself. "Stile" was in the scene and took clickbaiting to the extreme (though it wasn't called that at the time) by essentially turning into a site packed with "extreme" images and porn. A perennially down on his luck Rush Limbaugh fan called Jon Bence was also pretty famous for describing his mundane life in excruciating detail. The scene fizzled out within a few years, particularly once "blogging" became its own actual thing.
_audakel 10y ago
Wow..... Just went to the site he mentioned (rotten.com). I nearly threw up. I thought I had a decent stomach for stuff but that is fucked up. Sorry for the click bait sounding comment but I am disturbed after a few of the pics. I have no words.
- jameskegel 10y ago
  There are no offensive images on the root page and the links are fairly descriptive; if you viewed imagery that disturbed you, then take ownership of your own actions and don't click links that purport to be things that offend you.
  - salvar 10y ago
    I don't understand. How were they not taking responsibility for their own actions? Does that mean they should not talk about their actions, or anything related to them?
    - fao_ 10y ago
      They must subscribe to the branch of logic (andor High Horse) that encourages the idea that nobody that isn't them cannot complain about something.
      - jameskegel 10y ago
        No I subscribe to a great sense of personal agency. I'm appalled at how someone isn't being held accountable for their own actions. If you stub your toe you don't get to sue the person who laid the concrete.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- subie 10y ago
  Luckily the article isn't all about rotten.com. It just mentions it as a site that was around before social networks.
jamiethompson 10y ago
Reminds me of the time when I was running a dating site (before dating sites were really a thing) I released some untested code and wound up emailing every user with a huge email which was essentially a concatenation of every user's email content, personal information et al. Much anger was unleashed.
- mod 10y ago
  Probably what, 15 misplaced characters? Back in these days, dating sites and tested code both weren't things yet, IIRC.
gourou 10y ago
The code snipped at the end had me cracking up
- mst 10y ago
  I was mostly incredibly happy to see ancient perl code that didn't use prototypes or fail 'use strict'.
Asooka 10y ago
Well that site DEFINITELY falls foul of the Net Authority guidelines. Suggesting that NA isn't real, smh.
CodeCube 10y ago
Wow, ton of memories being dredged up by this post and the comments ... good times :) I often think back to that time period. He mentions that there was no concept of social networks back then, but IMO he's totally wrong. I mean, obviously there weren't any social networks as they exist today, but between the message board communities, and the massively interlinked personal e/n blogs ... there very much was a social network. And it was decentralized. For a short time, it was turning out to be a beautiful thing, especially once RSS started gaining popularity. I understand why myspace and facebook took all of that marketshare; it wasn't easy enough for the average person to put up their own site, and by the time things like wordpress became popular, every instance was so generic looking (despite templates) that it was tough to get anyone reading your stuff. There was a glimmer of hope with things like google's RSS reader, and Google's social graph API (https://developers.google.com/social-graph/ https://developers.google.com/social-graph/) ... the future could have been awesome, but alas
- fps 10y ago
  I think the Internet hasn't significantly changed since those days. I think the difference is that now it's on the publisher to get things in lots of places, vs before it was on the reader to aggregate all the sources that they cared about. You still have decentralized publishing, and you still have lots of disparate reading applications. News Aggregators like Something Awful, Slashdot and Fark have been superseded (for me) by Reddit and HN. IRC has been somewhat replaced by Slack, Gitter, Discord. AIM/MSN/ICQ has been replaced by a dozen other non-interoperable IM systems. BBS systems running on phpBB and other similar self-hosted tools are still massively popular. Email still chugs on, almost completely unchanged. I feel like Facebook solves the issue of a single, curated application platform that a user isn't expected to leave - what AOL/Prodigy/CompuServe used to do. I agree, I preferred some of the old technologies, as they seemed more open with a lower barrier to entry, but I don't think the future is particularly bleak.
lkrubner 10y ago
My favorite bit of trolling, from 2004, was the "I don't usually link to blonde jokes, because they are sexist, but this one was really funny..." Such a very clever bit of trolling. A few bloggers (most of a feminist mindset) agreed to launch it together, and they linked to each other. Then several dozen other prominent bloggers joined in, linking to each other with text, which varied but basically stayed with the same theme: "Blonde jokes are sexist, so I don't usually promote them, but this one was really funny..." So a person reading the first blog would click the link, and go to a second link where the text was again "I know, I know, I should not promote blonde jokes, they are sexist, but this one really made me laugh..." and you click again and again you read "This is the funniest blonde joke that I have ever read" and you click again and again you read "I hate blonde jokes, but this one made me laugh out loud..." and you click again... How many times did you click, before you realized the joke was on you? The joke was pretty much a test of your social intelligence. That joke really only worked in the blogosphere of 2000-2006, the era when the blogosphere was at its peak. I am not sure how anyone could recreate that joke now.
- OJFord 10y ago
  > That joke really only worked in the blogosphere of 2000-2006, the era when the blogosphere was at its peak. I am not sure how anyone could recreate that joke now. Are you kidding? I see people living through that joke all the time, it's Facebook -> Buzzfeed -> Mashable -> Vice -> names I don't know, promising you funny images, hot celebs, and OMG you won't believe what they look like now. They never deliver, because they don't have to: before you get to number 26 and see how unbelievable it is, something (promising something) even more shocking has popped up in a banner ad, and you've clicked on.
  - lkrubner 10y ago
    I responded in a different sub-thread, but again, I would say this isn't quite the same, because the links don't go in a circle. In the original "I don't usually link to blonde jokes, because they are sexist..." if you clicked the link enough times, you eventually came back to the website where you started. And then you knew the joke was on you.
- 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Wonderdonkey 10y ago
Easily 9.9 out of 10 people won't get sardonicism. My contribution was the Evil of Pippi Longstocking site, which aimed to prove that Pippi Longstocking is the devil. (Anybody remember the '90s?) The Daily Show, which thought I was serious, invited me to do an interview with Mo Rocca. (They were disappointed to learn the site was a joke.) I earned a headline in Sweden, and in the story Astrid Lindgren lamented being misunderstood (ha!). The hate mail (and some fan mail) from Sweden was precious. I later added a section on the site called "Swedemail." You'd think that would tip people off, but nope. Anyhoo, AOL took it down eventually. But it's still on archive.org, thankfully. Here's a later snapshot with the Swedemail section (complete with Barnes & Noble affiliate ads!) if anyone's interested. http://web.archive.org/web/20021017095408/http://members.aol.com/rtvdave/pippi.html http://web.archive.org/web/20021017095408/http://members.aol...
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law >Poe's law is an Internet adage that states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views Similar, there was also the Bert is Evil website from 1997, which attempted to "prove" the Seasame Street character Bert was evil. It contained a photo of Bert photoshopped with Osama Bin Laden which actually appeared on a sign at a pro-Bin Laden rally in Bangladesh. The sign holder simply printed out a picture they found on the web, unaware of who the character was or that the photo was a parody. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_is_Evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_is_Evil >After this photo was released on the news wires, the owners of Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop, raised the possibility of pursuing legal action against Ignacio. In response, he took down the "Bert is Evil" section of his website,[10]:736 also stating that he did not want to undermine the character in the eyes of children who watched Sesame Street. "I am doing this because I feel this has gotten too close to reality", he said.[11] Since the original Bert/Osama picture had been posted to Dennis Pozniak's mirror, he too was bombarded by the international media seeking interviews. As a result of all the attention Pozniak also closed his mirror.[12]
robthecoolest 10y ago
love your hax dude nice one
robthecoolest 10y ago
nice hax brb cool one
robthecoolest 10y ago
all hackers hack roblox or minecraft
oldsj 10y ago
I love that Joe Rogan took the time to email you about this but didn't catch on that it was a joke
marze 10y ago
The internet was nothing if not hyper free speech back then. So ironic that this shows up now, during the internet's "let's scrub out the fake news" phase.
owyn 10y ago
It was so easy to register weird domain names back then. Our contribution was satan.com. The guy who owned the domain name eventually sold it and it goes nowhere now. For a few years in the late 90's the entire site was just a badly drawn MS Paint image: http://web.archive.org/web/19980625181403/http://www.satan.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/19980625181403/http://www.satan.c... Clicking on that was a mailto: link that sent mail to an internal mailing list that we had. Got some good laughs from it but we could never figure out what to do with it. The archives are still floating around somewhere...
kordless 10y ago
> my massively inflated sense of self-importance from all of the blog posts, links, phone calls, and emails that continued to pour in clouded my judgement This is brilliant insight. I appreciate this site contributed to better understanding what a reality without trust would look like.
djhworld 10y ago
This was a really fun read, thanks. I first made it onto the web in 1999, those were the days!
gumby 10y ago
It was bittersweet to see Lester haines' name on that Register link. Lester passed away last summer -- he was an inspired writer and a jewel of the 21st century incarnation of The Register. The link must have been one of his early pieces and not up to his eventual standards.
jhobag 10y ago
http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html "Should I be concerned about Dihydrogen Monoxide?" classic
tomcam 10y ago
I will respect HN when a site making similar fun of Islam hits the front page

442 points by Rudism 10y ago

Fun read. The article mentions: > “e/n” sites (which was what blogs were sometimes called before the term “blog” had gained wider adoption) Does 'e/n' stand for something? This 1999 post [0] calls it 'Everything and Nothing', but I can't find anything else on it, is that right? It says: > This was probably influenced by the number of EBG-like sites popping up with the words “everything” or “nothing” in their name. EBG? I remember unabbreviated 'weblog' that seems all but gone now, but I've never come across 'e/n site' before. Also, spoiler alert: the domain in question now redirects to a new Github repo with the original site's source. [1] [0] - http://www.hearye.org/1999/05/whats-an-en-site/ http://www.hearye.org/1999/05/whats-an-en-site/ [1] - https://github.com/rudism/NetAuthority https://github.com/rudism/NetAuthority

fenomas 10y ago
> Does 'e/n' stand for something? Back when the term was current it was described to me as standing for "entertainment/news". (This was by someone who ran a small e/n site and generally followed the scene - though of course it could still be wrong.)
- jdalgetty 10y ago
  It was entertainment / news for me.
salvar 10y ago
The explanation I read back in the day was that e/n is something that means everything to the person who's writing it, and nothing to everyone else.
- tawayway 10y ago
  SomethingAwful still has an e/n forum for personal problems
frikk 10y ago
I got my start (in programming) building my first e/n site (god has it really been 18 years...). My personal understanding was that "e/n" stood for "everything/nothing". In my case, this was exactly correct. It was a place for my friends to post stupid stuff, a place for me to experiment with css and php, build new "features" just for fun. It was an open playground in a new world. It was a lot of fun. I also just remembered how it was hosted. I became known as the neighborhood kid who collected old computers, so I ended up with a bunch of weird hardware. The site was originally hosted on a 75mhz intel something or another sitting behind a 133mhz linux frankenstein gateway in my bedroom. I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data", when I clearly had the bandwidth logs that showed it wasnt possible! The other cool thing was connecting with other e/n site owners who were also doing their thing. Sometimes you'd collaborate or ping each other's APIs, other times participate in their own experiments. Thousands of little web sites with micro communities built on spaghetti code, almost all have certainly faded away through the various ways that tiny sites die: a web host gets sold, an upstream system upgrade botched but not addressed, a missed payment, an unpatched vulnerability. Maybe today the owner still maintains the domain name out of nostalgia. Shoutout to gyrate.org and sejje.net; Rest in peace, frikk.tk
- lucb1e 10y ago
  > I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data", when I clearly had the bandwidth logs that showed it wasnt possible! Same here, though probably about a decade later on early versions of mobile data. They still owe me like 15 euros of prepaid, but they're out of business by now.
  - vocatus_gate 10y ago
    > They still owe me like 15 euros of prepaid, but they're out of business by now. Never lose hope.
- sejje 10y ago
  Hey, frikk. What did you call that little chat box? Shoutbox? You invented twitter, pretty sure.
scrapcode 10y ago
I always knew it as entertainment/news
xd1936 10y ago
The best definitions I could find: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=e%2Fn http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=e%2Fn
specialp 10y ago
It was always everything/nothing. Because back then websites usually had some kind of purpose or category which usually was reflected in the domain name as well. But then sites like Stile Project and others mentioned there came out just talking about whatever the author wanted to rant about (IE the modern internet). So the category was everything and it was about nothing really important.
dickbasedregex 10y ago
I had an e/n site in the mid to late 90s with some popularity. I think StileProject probably coined the term. There was a whole group of people who were "internet famous" at the time whose names have been forgotten but I see "derivative work" every day.
- dickbasedregex 10y ago
  As for the meaning, yes, everything/nothing. Your blog is about everything and nothing. Seinfeld is "a show about nothing."
ChrisClark 10y ago
Back when I was reading those e/n sites I knew it as everything/nothing, the sites themselves would call it that too. As in, talking about anything they want, doesn't even have to be important.
petercooper 10y ago
everything and nothing. I ran such a site with a few friends in the late 90s/early 00s. Embarrassing proof: http://web.archive.org/web/20000521031551/http://www.thedaytoday.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20000521031551/http://www.thedayt... .. they were basically a genre of pre-blog sites where mostly (but not entirely) 15-25 year old males posted total trash like pictures of celebs they liked, offensive jokes, and, well, total trash :) e/n had a variety of celebs itself. "Stile" was in the scene and took clickbaiting to the extreme (though it wasn't called that at the time) by essentially turning into a site packed with "extreme" images and porn. A perennially down on his luck Rush Limbaugh fan called Jon Bence was also pretty famous for describing his mundane life in excruciating detail. The scene fizzled out within a few years, particularly once "blogging" became its own actual thing.

_audakel 10y ago

Wow..... Just went to the site he mentioned (rotten.com). I nearly threw up. I thought I had a decent stomach for stuff but that is fucked up. Sorry for the click bait sounding comment but I am disturbed after a few of the pics. I have no words.

jameskegel 10y ago
There are no offensive images on the root page and the links are fairly descriptive; if you viewed imagery that disturbed you, then take ownership of your own actions and don't click links that purport to be things that offend you.
- salvar 10y ago
  I don't understand. How were they not taking responsibility for their own actions? Does that mean they should not talk about their actions, or anything related to them?
  - fao_ 10y ago
    They must subscribe to the branch of logic (andor High Horse) that encourages the idea that nobody that isn't them cannot complain about something.
    - jameskegel 10y ago
      No I subscribe to a great sense of personal agency. I'm appalled at how someone isn't being held accountable for their own actions. If you stub your toe you don't get to sue the person who laid the concrete.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
subie 10y ago
Luckily the article isn't all about rotten.com. It just mentions it as a site that was around before social networks.

jamiethompson 10y ago

Reminds me of the time when I was running a dating site (before dating sites were really a thing) I released some untested code and wound up emailing every user with a huge email which was essentially a concatenation of every user's email content, personal information et al. Much anger was unleashed.

mod 10y ago
Probably what, 15 misplaced characters? Back in these days, dating sites and tested code both weren't things yet, IIRC.

gourou 10y ago

The code snipped at the end had me cracking up

mst 10y ago
I was mostly incredibly happy to see ancient perl code that didn't use prototypes or fail 'use strict'.

Asooka 10y ago

Well that site DEFINITELY falls foul of the Net Authority guidelines. Suggesting that NA isn't real, smh.

CodeCube 10y ago

Wow, ton of memories being dredged up by this post and the comments ... good times :) I often think back to that time period. He mentions that there was no concept of social networks back then, but IMO he's totally wrong. I mean, obviously there weren't any social networks as they exist today, but between the message board communities, and the massively interlinked personal e/n blogs ... there very much was a social network. And it was decentralized. For a short time, it was turning out to be a beautiful thing, especially once RSS started gaining popularity. I understand why myspace and facebook took all of that marketshare; it wasn't easy enough for the average person to put up their own site, and by the time things like wordpress became popular, every instance was so generic looking (despite templates) that it was tough to get anyone reading your stuff. There was a glimmer of hope with things like google's RSS reader, and Google's social graph API (https://developers.google.com/social-graph/ https://developers.google.com/social-graph/) ... the future could have been awesome, but alas

fps 10y ago
I think the Internet hasn't significantly changed since those days. I think the difference is that now it's on the publisher to get things in lots of places, vs before it was on the reader to aggregate all the sources that they cared about. You still have decentralized publishing, and you still have lots of disparate reading applications. News Aggregators like Something Awful, Slashdot and Fark have been superseded (for me) by Reddit and HN. IRC has been somewhat replaced by Slack, Gitter, Discord. AIM/MSN/ICQ has been replaced by a dozen other non-interoperable IM systems. BBS systems running on phpBB and other similar self-hosted tools are still massively popular. Email still chugs on, almost completely unchanged. I feel like Facebook solves the issue of a single, curated application platform that a user isn't expected to leave - what AOL/Prodigy/CompuServe used to do. I agree, I preferred some of the old technologies, as they seemed more open with a lower barrier to entry, but I don't think the future is particularly bleak.

lkrubner 10y ago

My favorite bit of trolling, from 2004, was the "I don't usually link to blonde jokes, because they are sexist, but this one was really funny..." Such a very clever bit of trolling. A few bloggers (most of a feminist mindset) agreed to launch it together, and they linked to each other. Then several dozen other prominent bloggers joined in, linking to each other with text, which varied but basically stayed with the same theme: "Blonde jokes are sexist, so I don't usually promote them, but this one was really funny..." So a person reading the first blog would click the link, and go to a second link where the text was again "I know, I know, I should not promote blonde jokes, they are sexist, but this one really made me laugh..." and you click again and again you read "This is the funniest blonde joke that I have ever read" and you click again and again you read "I hate blonde jokes, but this one made me laugh out loud..." and you click again... How many times did you click, before you realized the joke was on you? The joke was pretty much a test of your social intelligence. That joke really only worked in the blogosphere of 2000-2006, the era when the blogosphere was at its peak. I am not sure how anyone could recreate that joke now.

OJFord 10y ago
> That joke really only worked in the blogosphere of 2000-2006, the era when the blogosphere was at its peak. I am not sure how anyone could recreate that joke now. Are you kidding? I see people living through that joke all the time, it's Facebook -> Buzzfeed -> Mashable -> Vice -> names I don't know, promising you funny images, hot celebs, and OMG you won't believe what they look like now. They never deliver, because they don't have to: before you get to number 26 and see how unbelievable it is, something (promising something) even more shocking has popped up in a banner ad, and you've clicked on.
- lkrubner 10y ago
  I responded in a different sub-thread, but again, I would say this isn't quite the same, because the links don't go in a circle. In the original "I don't usually link to blonde jokes, because they are sexist..." if you clicked the link enough times, you eventually came back to the website where you started. And then you knew the joke was on you.
10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Wonderdonkey 10y ago

Easily 9.9 out of 10 people won't get sardonicism. My contribution was the Evil of Pippi Longstocking site, which aimed to prove that Pippi Longstocking is the devil. (Anybody remember the '90s?) The Daily Show, which thought I was serious, invited me to do an interview with Mo Rocca. (They were disappointed to learn the site was a joke.) I earned a headline in Sweden, and in the story Astrid Lindgren lamented being misunderstood (ha!). The hate mail (and some fan mail) from Sweden was precious. I later added a section on the site called "Swedemail." You'd think that would tip people off, but nope. Anyhoo, AOL took it down eventually. But it's still on archive.org, thankfully. Here's a later snapshot with the Swedemail section (complete with Barnes & Noble affiliate ads!) if anyone's interested. http://web.archive.org/web/20021017095408/http://members.aol.com/rtvdave/pippi.html http://web.archive.org/web/20021017095408/http://members.aol...

nommm-nommm 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law >Poe's law is an Internet adage that states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views Similar, there was also the Bert is Evil website from 1997, which attempted to "prove" the Seasame Street character Bert was evil. It contained a photo of Bert photoshopped with Osama Bin Laden which actually appeared on a sign at a pro-Bin Laden rally in Bangladesh. The sign holder simply printed out a picture they found on the web, unaware of who the character was or that the photo was a parody. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_is_Evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_is_Evil >After this photo was released on the news wires, the owners of Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop, raised the possibility of pursuing legal action against Ignacio. In response, he took down the "Bert is Evil" section of his website,[10]:736 also stating that he did not want to undermine the character in the eyes of children who watched Sesame Street. "I am doing this because I feel this has gotten too close to reality", he said.[11] Since the original Bert/Osama picture had been posted to Dennis Pozniak's mirror, he too was bombarded by the international media seeking interviews. As a result of all the attention Pozniak also closed his mirror.[12]

robthecoolest 10y ago

love your hax dude nice one

robthecoolest 10y ago

nice hax brb cool one

robthecoolest 10y ago

all hackers hack roblox or minecraft

oldsj 10y ago

I love that Joe Rogan took the time to email you about this but didn't catch on that it was a joke

marze 10y ago

The internet was nothing if not hyper free speech back then. So ironic that this shows up now, during the internet's "let's scrub out the fake news" phase.

owyn 10y ago

It was so easy to register weird domain names back then. Our contribution was satan.com. The guy who owned the domain name eventually sold it and it goes nowhere now. For a few years in the late 90's the entire site was just a badly drawn MS Paint image: http://web.archive.org/web/19980625181403/http://www.satan.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/19980625181403/http://www.satan.c... Clicking on that was a mailto: link that sent mail to an internal mailing list that we had. Got some good laughs from it but we could never figure out what to do with it. The archives are still floating around somewhere...

kordless 10y ago

> my massively inflated sense of self-importance from all of the blog posts, links, phone calls, and emails that continued to pour in clouded my judgement This is brilliant insight. I appreciate this site contributed to better understanding what a reality without trust would look like.

djhworld 10y ago

This was a really fun read, thanks. I first made it onto the web in 1999, those were the days!

gumby 10y ago

It was bittersweet to see Lester haines' name on that Register link. Lester passed away last summer -- he was an inspired writer and a jewel of the 21st century incarnation of The Register. The link must have been one of his early pieces and not up to his eventual standards.

jhobag 10y ago

http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html "Should I be concerned about Dihydrogen Monoxide?" classic

tomcam 10y ago

I will respect HN when a site making similar fun of Islam hits the front page