• CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    A very apt analogy and reminds me of the early days of the 'net. Among my peers, I was one of the first on the 'net, but I had been on BBSes quite a bit and had some minimal use of Qlink prior. And so you saw things that became memes in their own right in the early days, like MAKE.MONEY.FAST, and you wondered who fell for that stuff.

    Then came Eternal September. And as the rest of the world started to get on the 'net, I’d have associates, friends, family fall for all kinds of stuff - forwarding me emails involving wildly stupid urban legends, or the “if you forward this, Bill Gates will give you $$$” stuff, etc.

    It felt like I was always telling the same sort of person that you could easily think this through. It would bounce right off the skulls of some and they might drop the current thing, but fall for the next…usually the consequences were just wasting everyone else in their contact list’s time and clogging up email inboxes just a bit more.

    These days, I have a feeling virtually all these people that I’d try to gently coach on some rather basic critical thinking all voted 3x for Taco.