> people will ... not take any random thing on the Internet at face value Have you been following US politics lately? A great many people really seem to believ

> people will ... not take any random thing on the Internet at face value Have you been following US politics lately? A great many people really seem to believe that Trump lost the election only because of massive voter fraud, that his enemies are literally harvesting children's blood for adrenochrome. And we're not talking just about random nobodies here. There's at least one member of the US congress (Marjorie Taylor Greene) who is pretty open about believing this stuff, and two or three more who are less obvious about it. I've been on the internet over a decade longer than you, and the trend has never been toward people being more discerning about what they read. I've already written in this thread about being targeted, and it wasn't even the first time. The other, on LambdaMOO, got written up in a book. OP mentions not one but several examples. These campaigns do have real-world consequences, not just chuckles and remarks about fame. Maybe your experience does not include anything like that, but please don't act like your own experience must be the norm and anyone else's must be the anomaly. That's the most egregious kind of selection bias.