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I think it's because startups have been doing well lately. Whenever anything is doing well, its reputation contains a sort of potential energy that can be expl
by pg 13y ago
I think it's because startups have been doing well lately. Whenever anything is doing well, its reputation contains a sort of potential energy that can be exploited by someone attacking it.
E.g. "I found a mistake in Einstein's math" is going to get you a lot more attention than "I found a mistake in my next door neighbor's math."
- tomasien 13y agoI'm not sure if you use Facebook, but on Facebook there is a constant wave of quotes mis-attributed to Einstein and Thomas Jefferson. It's really interesting, they all get 10000's of shares. Somebody somewhere (or just the crowd accidentally) A/B tested a ton of different historical figures and came out with Einstein and TJ.
- bmelton 13y agoThe patois of misattribution is, often times, a rather fun deception -- to see who will share the meme. Things like "The internet is full of trolls" are captioned to a photo of Abraham Lincoln, for example. Or, more recently, the phenomenon of attributing moving quotations to Taylor Swift, or Barack Obama, where the actual source was Adolph Hitler. In short, you're not wrong that these things occur, but in some cases, they probably occur as a means of exploiting our collective ignorance, and/or our willingness to share things that we think are attributable to someone we might idolize. Summed up in a Hitler quote (attributable to anyone): "How fortunate for leaders that men do not think."
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]