

Confirmed: HOPA Dry Erase Girl Is A Hoax, Identity Revealed - RiderOfGiraffes
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/11/elyse-porterfield/

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randomwalker
Normally I wouldn't vote up this kind of trash, but I see something
interesting here.

"Mainstream culture" collapsed about a decade ago -- did you know that
Seinfeld was the last TV show watched regularly by 50% or more of the American
population? As the article notes, memes are increasingly where we get our
culture. And hoaxes are an integral part of the meme landscape.

Anyone who can find a way to modify the Internet (not the Internet itself, of
course, but people's use of the Internet) to better resist the spread of
hoaxes could significantly change society. Think not just hoaxes, but outrages
like #amazonfail. What a huge social cost (on attention, reputation etc) these
things impose. [http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/04/the-failure-of-
amazonfa...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/04/the-failure-of-amazonfail/)

Now that might not seem like a great startup idea -- users are just having fun
spreading links around (or getting outraged), and if you can't even monetize
content then how can you monetize crowdsourcing the truth?

But then I noticed that Fox News and other media outlets fell for this hoax.
Surely there's a significant monetary cost to that, which provides an
opportunity for a business model?

The old Snopes way of doing things isn't working so well any more -- these
things spread in _minutes_ , so the fact checking mechanism needs to use
channels similar to the ones that the hoaxes themselves do.

One possible idea is a prediction market (that pays out real money). If it is
successful, it might become a standard part of media fact checking policy to
check the prices there. A news organization probably be willing to actually
wager a few thousand dollars -- a fraction of what the story is worth to them.
Coming back to this example, that would give a tremendous incentive to one of
the many people involved in creating this hoax to make a decent pile of money
through the prediction site (anonymously, in fact). In effect, it would be a
way for anonymous tipsters to leak out the word (in addition to aggregating
third-party analysis and intelligence), except it would be far more
streamlined and effective because it's a market.

Anyway, just a thought.

~~~
d4nt
I like the idea, although I don't think it will stop this kind of thing
spreading. I think most people suspected it was a fake, but still spread the
story because it was a funny story. Its a bit like a modern version of "Two
guys walk into a bar..." jokes. Everyone knows two guys didn't really walk
into a bar.

Even if a meme is obviously not true, many Media outlets would still be
prepared to report it as a "looks what's causing a stir on the internet"
story. Although, having a slight possibility of it being true does give them
some "journalistic cover".

~~~
dkarl
There's something about the _possibility_ of it being real that makes it more
compelling. With this video, the "real story" aspect was needed to raise it
above the "meh" threshold to make it viral. People passing it around, knowing
that it was the kind of thing that usually turns out to be a hoax, were
engaged in a collective suspension of disbelief.

If something becomes boring when we face up to what we already believe about
it, then I think there's something wrong with pretending it wasn't boring in
the first place. If there was a shortage of mildly gratifying and amusing
stuff on the internet, then I would condone any means for dealing with that
shortage, but damn it, that is obviously not the case. There are enough mildly
amusing novelty videos in the world that we don't need to give any of them
this kind of crutch.

I may sound like the kind of hysterical religious nut who used to say that
novels were lies, and therefore evil, because they were not literally true,
but fiction is meant to be appreciated by people who know it is fiction. My
standard is whether I have to cultivate a misconception about the provenance
of something in order to enjoy it. The obvious weak point in my argument is
that reading a novel arguably involves reading it _as if it were true_ , and
that the way we lie to ourselves when we pass around a "true" story that we
know probably won't hold up is no different from the we lie to ourselves when
reading a novel. That may be true. I think it's not.

Anyway, why should we care? Because this is exactly the form of most of the
political propaganda passed around on the internet: birther theories, black
helicopters, the stories about prison camps and impending roundups (recycled
from the Clinton years for Obama,) and so on. I think a sizable proportion of
people who pass them around know they're not true, and simply find them
gratifying. Obviously they don't mind that a large number of people end up
believing them. If we're going to criticize that as intellectually wrong, then
we should meet the same intellectual standards. If we accept that it's
intellectually fine, then we are left arguing that their means are acceptable,
and they're just working for the wrong side, instead of working for the right
side like us.

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simonsarris
So the ironic bit is that she was hired (to do the shoot) _because_ she was a
HPOA.

~~~
Tichy
I wonder how viral the thing would have become if instead of calling her a
HPOA, the offending snippet would have been calling her a fat cow or something
like that (with a fat model obviously).

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mfr
Of course, I wanted to believe it was true. Unappreciated worker with morally-
lite boss in a despised industry. What's not to like?

The lighting was too good though. Specifically, it looked like there was a
tripod, a well-calibrated fill-flash and an additional, off-center light
source.

Clearly, not impossible for a person and a timer to do, but it began to hit
the limits of plausibility.

~~~
CWuestefeld
I called this as a hoax from the beginning, but for different reasons (yours
are good, too).

She calls out the boss for playing Farmville all day. Yet Farmville is a
Facebook app, running inside FB. So all she would know is that he spends all
day in FB, not specifically what he's doing there.

~~~
BerislavLopac
My clue was that she didn't show any percentage of his time being spent
watching porn. It's inconceivable to me that an obviously straight, sexist man
(HOPA remark) would spend all that time playing Farmville and none watching
porn.

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bbuffone
I assume everything on the web is a hoax. especially the things that have as
little meaning as this

~~~
noodle
i assume everything on "the chive", a pretty clear ripoff of "the onion", is
likely going to be fake.

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keithwarren
Dye her hair red and she can play Anna Chapman in the Russian spy movie.

------
Herring
The tech echo chamber is getting worse. If people don't trust their sources,
that leads to increasingly polarized opinions.

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adamilardi
This is a sad day. If you can't trust the internet who can you trust.

~~~
mindcrime
The government?

~~~
adamilardi
I just thought it would be hilarious if politicians started doing ASK HN:
before they voted on a bill.. it would go like this... "I need to vote on this
saving the children bill but I'm not sure it's the right thing and I'm also
having trouble syncing my contacts from my ipad to my ipod please help" , joe
politician

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kilian
It was funny, but obviously fake. No one except a sysadmin with access logs*
could find out someone played Farmville 19.7 hours a week. It's just that I
couldn't bring myself to point that out to people.

Now, all we need to find out is how they got so much traction to begin with,
and apply that to our startups/webapps :)

* or someone with a Wakoopa account ;)

~~~
brazzy
IIRC the photo messages explicitly mentioned "Spencer" installing software to
monitor people's internet usage, and giving "the codes" to "Jenny".

~~~
gaius
Oh right! I read that as "the cocks" and wondered WTF she was on about.

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mdg
Is that jQuery John ?

~~~
willwagner
I think the article has the name wrong. In the article text, they spell the
last name "Resig" but if you look at one of the screenshots, the actual name
is "Rezig".

