
How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment - danso
http://www.geek.com/news/how-i-used-lies-about-a-cartoon-to-prove-history-is-meaningless-on-the-internet-1656188/
======
JackFr
I don't think it's the internet's fault. In 1941 a couple of friends made a
few phone calls to newspaper sports desks and concocted a college football
team:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/sports/ncaafootball/the-41...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/sports/ncaafootball/the-41-season-
at-plainfield-teachers-college-when-every-play-was-a-fake.html?_r=0)

~~~
CapitalistCartr
In Tampa we have an annual celebration each year, in the style of New Orlean's
Mardi Gras, of the notorious pirate José Gaspar capturing the city more than a
century ago. Of course its all made-up nonsense. None of it ever happened. We
still have a great party for it.

~~~
nommm-nommm
The National Baseball Hall of Fame is located in Cooperstown, NY, a tiny
village in the middle of nowhere. Cooperstown was chosen because a man named
Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. A baseball field,
Doubleday Field, stands on the exact location where baseball was invented.

Of course, that is a totally made up story.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubleday_myth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubleday_myth)

------
Dove
There was an article a couple days ago about why everyone believes Columbus
proved the world was round[1], even though that isn't true[2]:

    
    
        The real myth of the medieval flat earth begins first 
        in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has 
        two principal sources. Probably the most influential 
        of these was the American author Washington Irving 
        who in his fictional biography of Columbus claimed 
        that Columbus had to fight against the Church’s 
        belief that the world was flat in order to get 
        permission and backing for his voyage, a complete 
        fabrication. 
    

I see an interesting parallel between the two cases. When you're the most
influential person talking about something (or the only person at all...),
people who later want to learn about the subject treat you as the best
available authority, even if you're a bad one. Information is copied from
authorities and self-reinforcing over time, much like genes in a population.
What that means is when there's a bottleneck in the number of people talking
about a topic, you can see a founder effect[3].

[1][https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/repeat-after-me-
they...](https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/repeat-after-me-they-knew-it-
was-round-damn-it/)

[2]That Columbus proved it, that is, not that the world is round.

[3][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect)

~~~
vidarh
Of the many sources to demonstrate that it was well known that the Earth was
round, I like Dante the best: His Divine Comedy explicitly described the world
as spherical, described how that meant different parts had day and night at
different times, described how the stars would be different, etc.. It's not a
very early source - there are many earlier ones -, but his level of detail
shows that it was well understood what it meant and that the idea could be
published in a work dealing with religion without controversy in the middle of
Europe.

------
projectramo
I know this is pitched as an experiment about the internet, but I think it is
an even more telling experiment about the malleability of human memory.

~~~
MollyR
I'm still wondering if its really the malleability of human memory or our need
to fit in / social pressure to conform ?

~~~
munificent
A little from column A and a little from column B.

I have young kids and it's _fascinating_ watching them talk about half-
remembered stuff from the past. They'll start off not really remembering much
and taking guesses. Then the other takes that guess as gospel and repeats it
back. Now the first has more confident. Soon they are both fully convinced of
a whole pile of fabrications.

It made me realize how much of our memory is socially constructed.

~~~
MollyR
Not sure I understand. Isn't memory of experience different than our believing
it ?

Or is it something like there isn't "truth" in our memory ?

~~~
toss1
Excellent question, and the answer is that human memory is generally highly
fallible, malleable, and unreliable.

We all have the naive impression that memory is somehow like a video recording
and we can just access it to find out what happened. Indeed, we all have some
very vivid and probably quite accurate memories about some exceptional events,
or can recall exactly what page and what part of the page we read some
specific item. There area also examples of amazing memory stunts and records,
and even memory contests and championships.

But we cannot assume that just because we have some very good memories, memory
is generally good, indeed, it is mostly pretty bad, especially compared to any
kind of recording system.

This is supported by several areas of research demonstrating how easy it is to
plant fake memories, reshape memories, and get people to be completely
convinced that they are describing are exact and real.

One area of research is eyewitness testimony, which has pretty much been the
standard in courts since courts existed, yet when eyewitness accounts are
compared, they almost always come up with a variety of contradictions.

There's also been research into the phenomena of "found" or "recovered"
memories often used to convict accused child abusers. Again, it turns out that
suggestion and guidance on the part of the investigator can create things our
or whole cloth, so it must be very carefully guarded against.

There's also several other research areas in which this is relevant, but the
outcome is pretty consistent -- human memory is generally pretty bad (sorry I
haven't got the time to track down the references).

I've found that it's best to just treat memory as merely a good hint about
what might have happened (or where I might have left that tool or the keys),
and then look for actual evidence of what really happened.

~~~
alaskanloops
Also the "Mandela Effect".

For example I, as well as many others on the Internet, remember the James Bond
Semi-Villain Jaws's romantic interest as being a blond, pig tailed,
bespectacled girl with a large smile and a mouth full of braces. We're sure
she had braces, that was the whole joke! Turns out, no record of her having
braces whatsoever.

Weird that a memory could permeate society like that.

edit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/3vzk53/my_ma...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/3vzk53/my_mandela_effect_memory_about_the_james_bond/)

------
ipsin
I honestly don't understand the animosity towards the author.

I consider this sort of mischief to be a healthy thing. If you are exposed to
_true facts_ constantly, all facts are true, in the same way that a TSA X-ray
tech who sees ten thousand not-bombs might miss the one actual bomb.

I think of lies and disinformation as good for a mental agility, and an
adjunct of storytelling. Is there no space for the trickster in our lives?

~~~
mangeletti
If you're referring to my comment and the tree under that, there isn't any
animosity whatsoever, just a lack of respect for the notion that the author's
own mischief is somehow a sign of how the Internet isn't capable of
representing truths, which is absurd.

------
vessenes
To those who are questioning how much truth the 'confession' has in it, you
are definitely getting in the spirit of things.

The confession is sort of a buzzfeed-ish version of Umberto Eco's Foucault's
Pendulum, and he digs in, at length musing on lies and truth and how they mush
together in ways that are very hard to untangle.

At any rate, if you liked the essay, I recommend the book.

------
6stringmerc
In my opinion, this prank is very intricate and took a lot of effort while not
actually proving the point that "history is meaningless on the internet"
because the subject matter - the Street Sharks - are/were essentially
forgotten by history itself. Sometimes things just naturally slide away and
nobody cares. It's like, "What year did the black Power Ranger turn good?" or
"What was the top selling Rock band in the years 1975-1983?" and then making
up an answer because, well, it's not really pertinent stuff. There are much
better cons online, I like to think...edit...even if this is some kind of
meta-joke where it turns out all the fake parts are being faked...sigh...

~~~
justinlardinois
> "What year did the black Power Ranger turn good?"

Was the black power ranger ever bad? I recall the green ranger going bad, then
later returning, reformed, as the white ranger.

Or was mixing up the colors intentional to further your point?

~~~
Klinky
The episode was Season 5 Episode 14 "Once You Go Black, You Never Go Back".

In the season finale, Zack absorbs Rita's evil power crystal and turns on the
Power Rangers and Angel Grove. Zordon informs the Power Rangers of a secret
cave containing the reversal crystal, but Rita and her Octopig monster have
other plans. Can the Power Rangers morph in time to save Zack and Angel Grove?

~~~
smellf
> "Once You Go Black, You Never Go Back"

I lol'd. Too over the top though.

------
conradfr
That's great. I love how myths can still be created and spread in this
Internet age.

Another example : around 2005 someone made a playlist for himself of some Mars
Volta b-sides and called it "A Missing Chromosome" [1]. Somehow it spread on
P2P networks, was even listed on Wikipedia in the band's discography section
with a back story etc.

I still have it in my collection under that name with the art etc and don't
see the need to correct it.

A forum I'm in maintains a list of some fake things they put in Wikipedia.
It's harder to do these days but some are still there and we joke that some
parts may have found their way in some student school work.

1\.
[http://forum.thecomatorium.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=105...](http://forum.thecomatorium.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=105589)

~~~
fixermark
Consider the Slender Man story, which was concocted more-or-less whole-cloth
on Somethingawful.com's fora. Two young people stabbed a third ostensibly to
sacrifice her to this character, and one of the editors of somethingawful.com
posted an article [[http://www.somethingawful.com/news/slenderman-not-
real/](http://www.somethingawful.com/news/slenderman-not-real/)] reminding
people that the story was 100% fabrication.

------
TeMPOraL
What surprised me the most was people willing to go along with a lie. Human
memory is a pretty faulty and malleable thing, but this level of confusion as
was cited at one point in the article? I think it requires someone to be
either consciously lying or have utter disregard to the value of what they're
saying. It's one thing to repeat a lie because you didn't know the information
wasn't true (though I'd consider providing confidence estimates on information
you repeat as a basic human decency); it's something else entirely to
repackage the lie and sell it as something you vouch for personally. These
people are bullshit amplifiers.

~~~
sp332
Information that's mostly true with a few lies thrown in is very hard to
verify.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Fair enough, but posting that you have a movie that never existed recorded on
tape because you presumably liked it so much - that's a completely different
thing. That people are willing to do this - for what? Internet points? -
saddens me deeply.

------
imron
Back in the early days of the IMDB, and before they got strict with
verification, my brother uploaded information and credits for his high school
movie assignments, which I had 'acted' in.

A Google search for my real name still returns my IMDB actors page as one of
the top links.

------
mangeletti
I can't help but read this like:

    
    
        Let me show you how dangerous sidewalks are
        by telling you the story about the time I
        went for a walk while swinging a spiked bat
        at every passer by. It was great fun, but it
        demonstrates why sidewalks are dangerous.

~~~
tryitnow
No. It's more like he was swinging a foam bat and is warning us how easy it
would be for someone more malicious to swing a spiked bat.

Seriously, I don't really care if some teenager creates a non-sense fanfic
world on poorly monitored sites.

However, it is noteworthy how the utter lack of quality control on so many
Internet properties can propagate falsehoods.

This undermines the claim that the Internet was supposed to be this
"Information Superhighway" (lol, remember that term?) leading to a more
informed society.

This just hasn't panned out the way the tech utopians of the 90s thought it
would. What they failed to foresee is that the abundance of information can
lead to just as much ignorance as the lack of information.

~~~
mangeletti
I think the problems you're bringing up cannot be solved.

Information (re: "Information Superhighway") is information. In this utopian
idea of "quality control", who does the quality control? Houghton Mifflin[1]?

If history is just a set of lies agreed upon[2], I'd rather have the consensus
of the Internet than whoever it is you purport should be in control of
quality.

1\. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-
sheet/wp/2014/09/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-
sheet/wp/2014/09/12/proposed-texas-textbooks-are-inaccurate-biased-and-
politicized-new-report-finds/)

2\.
[http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/napoleonbo161968....](http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/napoleonbo161968.html)

~~~
GrumpyYoungMan
Not necessarily. The key problem is that primary sources are either in non-
searchable hardcopy format (books, etc.) or inaccessible behind paywalls,
making it impractical to do wide-ranging research outside of the academic
libraries maintained by by large universities.

It would take quite a major revision to copyright law but it's not impossible
to imagine some future version of a library where one can search digitized
versions of all known works and correlate between them.

------
drivingmenuts
It's going to be a much bigger problem in the future.

I looked at the descriptions for the three shows. Frankly, nothing seemed out-
of-line because I didn't watch toy-oriented cartoons in the 90s and that
subject matter falls into a genre I just don't care about. Truthfully, I
suspect that those synopses pretty much describe all 90s cartoons.

For that matter, your entire article could be a social experiment, but the
subject matter of Street Sharks is so far off the spectrum of things I care
about that it's the first time I've ever even heard of them.

But, it does illustrate how easy it is to slip things in like that. Do it
enough times with lots of small things and sooner or later, you have enough
evidence for something larger and so on and so forth.

Still don't care about Street Sharks, though.

And please, for the love of <deity>, don't show this to Michael Bay.

------
FussyZeus
None of this is the author's fault. The initial lie was meant as harmless fun,
the fact that so many (largely highly regarded) media properties went and
spewed it out as fact later on is the real problem. I mean how many times a
week do we hear about Old Big Media retweeting nonsense or publishing Onion
articles?

News sources these days are so programmed to chase every story that there's no
room for fact checking and they all look like incredible idiots. It's amazing
to me that anyone takes Old Media seriously anymore.

~~~
passivepinetree
What news sources do you use? What is New Media?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Doesn't matter. Pretty much everyone knows most of media publishing is
bullshit. After N+1th comment thread debunking a news article I'd thought at
least everyone on HN understands that implicitly now. But quite many people
agree and then immediately forget about it when the next story hits.

On-line news publishers don't care about accuracy or truth. Period.

------
EGreg
I have done something less malicious, but right around the same time.

When I was in NYU's grad math program, the Wikipedia just getting going. It
had a lot of articles, but not on every topic. I was studying Analysis and
decided to start the article on the Hessian Matrix.

Yes, I started that article and it's been fun to watch it grow over the years.
Most sections I have added are still there, as well as some phrases such as
"more can be said from the point of view of Morse Theory". It really set the
direction of the subsequent topics and edits.

One section in particular, there, was completely made up by me. It was
ACTUALLY TRUE, but it was never (to my knowledge) stated anywhere. No one had
really made a treatment of the matter. Namely:

Hessians of vector valued functions. I said they were tensors of rank 3.

There was a discussion in the talk page about it. Some people were confused
and argued for a bit but since was true, the community kept it, thinking that
being a true math concept it must have a source somewhere. Now it has been
expanded and an actual analysis of how it can be a tensor of rank 3 has been
worked out. Now this may have led to citations that will lead to research on
Hessians of vector valued functions acting as tensors. All because I wrote it
there.

It wasn't false, like the Colbert's lie that "Elephant population of Africa
has tripled in the last six months." But it was an experiment to see what an
unsourced original statement would lead to on a fairly mainstream article.

------
andrewflnr
I think Rox->Roxie is a pretty plausible confusion even without "malicious"
interference, so I'm not sure those parts prove anything.

~~~
bendmorris
The actual Rox was a human, though, not a female Street Shark as the author
described her and people are claiming to remember her.

Edit: to be fair, I'm trusting the author's current account, I never watched
Street Sharks myself. I could be the victim of some epic meta trolling.

------
smaili
IMHO I think it was the fact that the show was so obscure and lacked enough
popularity to actually motivate people to bother validating it. If it was a
much more popular show, say The Big Bang Theory, there would be enough
knowledgable people to catch the falsities.

------
fapjacks
I have done very similar stuff to Wikipedia for almost ten years now. It is
astonishingly easy to make specious claims in backwater articles that no one
cares about. It is pretty insane what happens to the articles afterwards. For
example, on one article, _someone else_ has made a couple of edits adding
_even more lies_ to my completely invented claims! Another "subtle vandal" (as
I call myself)! I never expected that. And when someone else edits your false
information for clarity, or whatever, it's as good as gold. One trick I use to
encourage that is to make minor grammatical or spelling errors. If a human
doesn't lumber by to edit (and then seal into fact) my bullshit information,
usually an automated bot will eventually do the same thing. It's very
important not to make your information sound too trite or wild. Most Wikipedia
editors take everything with a big grain of salt the last few years.

------
coldcode
Truth is such a slippery concept. How easy it was to create by a school kid,
and how organically it grew over time despite being entirely made up. Imagine
how much better people with professional tools and desire can generate much
more harmful information than fake Henry Winkler appearances.

~~~
rspeer
A while back, I forget who, but someone tracked down some false facts that
were supported by circular references in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia doesn't allow you to cite Wikipedia, of course, but the trickster
added an unsupported, false fact to Wikipedia, which was quoted by someone's
blog, which was quoted in an article by a "science" "journalist", and then the
trickster updated the Wikipedia page to reference that article.

I think it's important to take note that this can happen instead of dismissing
it as childish pranks. We should apply the "security mindset" to our sources
of information, not just to our computation.

~~~
adrianN
Maybe you remember [https://xkcd.com/978/](https://xkcd.com/978/)

~~~
rspeer
Good point. It's clearly based on a real thing, too.

------
MollyR
A little scary what this implies about groups of people with axes to grind on
places like wikipedia.

~~~
fullshark
It's why the wikipages on hot button issues that special interests care
passionately about (Scientology, Abortion, etc) are so heavily moderated.

~~~
MollyR
But who moderates the moderators ?

In this article, the author mentioned he became an editor for street sharks to
help him spread his lies.

------
nkrisc
What I think is most interesting is the people who all claim to "remember"
these lies. Are they knowingly claiming to remember something they never saw
to appear more knowledgeable or is their memory shaped by these lies they
read? The latter is scarier.

------
tuna-piano
For those blaming the guy, and not the system / sites.

If Obama used the fake fact in a speech of his, would you blame his
researchers or the guy who originally made up the lie?

I think the point is that authorities on information have a responsibility to
ensure the information is accurate.

~~~
iamgopal
How deep you go for checking the fact ? Ultimately you always need to depends
on someone/something else.

------
superJimmy64
"I’m living in an ontological nightmare of my own making. It’s jawsome!"

Had me in tears. Also, I completely forgot about that show until coming across
this so thanks for bring back some history!

------
koolba
This is a jawesome playbook of how "facts 2.0" get created.

------
cloudjacker
I was hoping this would reference the Berenstain Bears thing. I thought that
was stupid because someone was obviously introducing a psychological
impression when creating the theory.

------
madebysquares
The idea that lies and misinformation can spread quickly and widely on the
internet is proven almost daily. If you've ever seen a onion or any other
satirical website post a story and then get shared liked, commented on,
restated and then its like wait did none of you 60-70 ppl realize the article
was fake?

------
justinlardinois
Reminds me of the tale of Slow Blind Driveway, which if I recall correctly was
the longest running hoax ever on Wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia/Slow_Blind_Driveway)

And of the fingerboxes meme on 4chan.

------
bitwize
This reminds me of the time some fangirl invented an entire season of
_Inspector Gadget_ with her fan character in a prominent role as a love
interest for Gadget -- and tried to pass it off as if it really happened,
replete with faked screenshots of Gadget and her invention. The IG fan
community actually took the bait for a while before she was outed.

------
ikeboy
[http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/wikipedia-hoax-yuri-
ga...](http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/wikipedia-hoax-yuri-gadyukin-
nitrate-movie/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724350)

------
Namrog84
What if this article was the social experiment. Did anyone verify any of the
claims that he had even actually lied. Maybe he is fabricating a story about
fabrication? I know I didn't verify. But don't fall into his sneaky trap
again(or perhaps the first time).

------
Aelinsaar
More like, "I used lies about a cartoon to convince some people online that
history is meaningless on the internet." Nothing was proved, and I wonder how
long that deception lasted. Edit: Title has since been changed.

------
syphilis2
It's interesting that in this case the misinformation can readily be proven
false. What method is there to identify incorrect information when no primary
source exists? How much trusted information can never be verified?

------
owly
No one has mentioned the 2016 Election and the fabrication of stories from the
front runners of both parties. History and memory are not being erased, just
overwritten with new "facts".

------
fennecfoxen
This seems like an interesting article. However, the large advertisement on
the screen covering the entire viewport with no 'close' button makes reading
it a real challenge.

~~~
pinum
You need a better ad blocker.

------
dsugarman
think about how much worse it was before the internet

------
Endy
One word applies: JAWSOME!!!

------
kolapuriya
The fact that people have blindly accepted them as false is subtlety proving
his point about history on the internet.

the fact that you do not understand that people simply do not care about
street sharks does not make his premise intelligent or thought provoking.

------
sp332
So, you lied, but it's someone else's fault?

 _After all, what kind of person would intentionally sow lies about Street
Sharks across the internet?_

Well, not a good one.

~~~
Balgair
Meh. I see this more as god-tier trolling. We have no way to easily tell if
this piece is a total lie or a long delayed admission of truth. I'm certainly
not ever going to research this to determine if it is valid. And that is what
makes the troll god-tier. The nugget of truth he alludes to is then instantly
suspect for everything now. Though I may forget that the internet of made up
of dogs impersonating people from time to time, upon reflection I will
remember the Street Sharks guy and be brought back to the 'center'; that
everything on the net is a lie. The commentary on epistemology and nihilism
aside, this guy is a god-tier troll. Soberly, I'll never trust a thing on here
again.

~~~
jessaustin
Grandparent probably doesn't consider trolls to be "good people". Of course,
with the wisdom of experience one finds that trolling is just another form of
rhetoric, neither "good" nor "bad". Good people will troll us to the truth at
least as often as bad people will troll us to butthurt.

~~~
sp332
Liars, not trolls. I mean I guess there's overlap but it's the lying I'm
calling out. The author seems continually surprised and concerned that people
would believe lies about history, but that's not new or surprising or even
interesting. In fact that's why we each have a responsibility to tell the
truth.

~~~
jessaustin
Everyone who communicates, lies. One who doesn't expect that, won't be able to
make much sense of the world. It's not useful to draw bright lines around the
category of "lies". It would be pretty awful to lie to your boyfriend about
whether you had an STD, or to your kid about the existence of imaginary
holiday characters. Making up shit about some forgotten TV show just ain't the
same thing.

The best trolling may not be _precisely_ lying, but it's certainly more about
assuming alternate versions of reality than it is about e.g. just being rude.

~~~
grkvlt
> It would be pretty awful to lie [...] to your kid about the existence of
> imaginary holiday characters

True. But people do it, regularly and consistently, and in fact protect their
children from finding out about said lies, with ever more complex mechanisms.
But, strangely, most people who do this seem to think it's a good thing to lie
like this. Not sure why, and I suspect it sets a bad example to children that
adults are not to be trusted, as they make things up. And that it is OK to do
it, since there are no bad consequences for the adults, so why not lie
themselves?

~~~
jessaustin
Are you around kids much? They certainly don't need any encouragement to lie!

It has long been my policy to tell my young nieces and nephews really obvious
lies on a regular basis, just to let them practice their critical thinking. I
love the looks of dawning realization and the swiftly following cries of "nuh-
uh!" My oldest niece has heard enough of these that she just smirks when she
hears another one.

Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are sort of an internal critique of
Christianity. Sadly I think this critique goes over most people's heads, and
their eventual disillusionment is more upsetting as a result. Still, parents
have to try. To give away the game, I don't actually think there's anything
wrong with this particular lie.

