
Trolling the Entire Internet - Rudism
https://codeword.xyz/2017/03/15/that-time-i-trolled-the-entire-internet/
======
Wonderdonkey
Easily 9.9 out of 10 people won't get sardonicism. My contribution was the
Evil of Pippi Longstocking site, which aimed to prove that Pippi Longstocking
is the devil. (Anybody remember the '90s?)

The Daily Show, which thought I was serious, invited me to do an interview
with Mo Rocca. (They were disappointed to learn the site was a joke.)

I earned a headline in Sweden, and in the story Astrid Lindgren lamented being
misunderstood (ha!).

The hate mail (and some fan mail) from Sweden was precious. I later added a
section on the site called "Swedemail." You'd think that would tip people off,
but nope.

Anyhoo, AOL took it down eventually. But it's still on archive.org,
thankfully. Here's a later snapshot with the Swedemail section (complete with
Barnes & Noble affiliate ads!) if anyone's interested.
[http://web.archive.org/web/20021017095408/http://members.aol...](http://web.archive.org/web/20021017095408/http://members.aol.com/rtvdave/pippi.html)

~~~
nommm-nommm
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law)

>Poe's law is an Internet adage that states that, without a clear indicator of
the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so
obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as
a sincere expression of the parodied views

Similar, there was also the Bert is Evil website from 1997, which attempted to
"prove" the Seasame Street character Bert was evil. It contained a photo of
Bert photoshopped with Osama Bin Laden which actually appeared on a sign at a
pro-Bin Laden rally in Bangladesh. The sign holder simply printed out a
picture they found on the web, unaware of who the character was or that the
photo was a parody.

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

>After this photo was released on the news wires, the owners of Sesame Street,
Sesame Workshop, raised the possibility of pursuing legal action against
Ignacio. In response, he took down the "Bert is Evil" section of his
website,[10]:736 also stating that he did not want to undermine the character
in the eyes of children who watched Sesame Street. "I am doing this because I
feel this has gotten too close to reality", he said.[11] Since the original
Bert/Osama picture had been posted to Dennis Pozniak's mirror, he too was
bombarded by the international media seeking interviews. As a result of all
the attention Pozniak also closed his mirror.[12]

~~~
js2
Back in the late nineties, I and a few coworkers called Gene Ray, the Time
Cube guy. We were sure his site was parody. After a few minutes conversation,
we concluded he was sincere. Therein lies the danger of extreme parody --
there are enough oddballs out there that you can't immediately discount
something as parody.

~~~
nommm-nommm
I want to believe the Flat Earth Society is parody... but I know a Flat
Earther and he's totality serious. :-/

~~~
vocatus_gate
I wintered over in Antarctica last year, and regularly had people DM'ing me on
Instagram (probably searched for the #antarctica hashtag) and asking if it was
actually real, if it was really an ice wall, if there were "secret military
blackout zones" etc. It was pretty funny. I always took time out to answer
them, but often I'd have to block them once it became apparent they were never
going to be convinced.

------
OJFord
Fun read. The article mentions:

> _“e /n” sites (which was what blogs were sometimes called before the term
> “blog” had gained wider adoption)_

Does 'e/n' stand for something? This 1999 post [0] calls it 'Everything and
Nothing', but I can't find anything else on it, is that right? It says:

> _This was probably influenced by the number of EBG-like sites popping up
> with the words “everything” or “nothing” in their name._

EBG?

I remember unabbreviated 'weblog' that seems all but gone now, but I've never
come across 'e/n site' before.

Also, spoiler alert: the domain in question now redirects to a new Github repo
with the original site's source. [1]

[0] - [http://www.hearye.org/1999/05/whats-an-en-
site/](http://www.hearye.org/1999/05/whats-an-en-site/)

[1] -
[https://github.com/rudism/NetAuthority](https://github.com/rudism/NetAuthority)

~~~
frikk
I got my start (in programming) building my first e/n site (god has it really
been 18 years...). My personal understanding was that "e/n" stood for
"everything/nothing". In my case, this was exactly correct.

It was a place for my friends to post stupid stuff, a place for me to
experiment with css and php, build new "features" just for fun. It was an open
playground in a new world. It was a lot of fun. I also just remembered how it
was hosted. I became known as the neighborhood kid who collected old
computers, so I ended up with a bunch of weird hardware. The site was
originally hosted on a 75mhz intel something or another sitting behind a
133mhz linux frankenstein gateway in my bedroom. I remember getting mad at my
internet provider when they claimed I had used up "all 10 gb of data", when I
clearly had the bandwidth logs that showed it wasnt possible!

The other cool thing was connecting with other e/n site owners who were also
doing their thing. Sometimes you'd collaborate or ping each other's APIs,
other times participate in their own experiments. Thousands of little web
sites with micro communities built on spaghetti code, almost all have
certainly faded away through the various ways that tiny sites die: a web host
gets sold, an upstream system upgrade botched but not addressed, a missed
payment, an unpatched vulnerability. Maybe today the owner still maintains the
domain name out of nostalgia. Shoutout to gyrate.org and sejje.net; Rest in
peace, frikk.tk

~~~
pixl97
> I remember getting mad at my internet provider when they claimed I had used
> up "all 10 gb of data

Lots of data accounting systems 'back in the day' counted every packet as 1500
bytes. So if you send 1 million packets it was

    
    
         1,500 * 1,000,000 = 1.5GB
    

In reality the average packet size in 98 or so was much smaller

    
    
         600 * 350,000 = 210 MB
         1,500 * 650,000 = 975 MB
         Total = 1.185GB (a difference of 315MB)
    
    

[https://www.caida.org/research/traffic-
analysis/pkt_size_dis...](https://www.caida.org/research/traffic-
analysis/pkt_size_distribution/graphs.xml)

Depending on your packet profile you may have seen anywhere from a 20 to 50%
overhead.

~~~
kbenson
Which is ridiculous. I worked at an ISP in '99, and even back then it was just
Apache log parsing with Perl (whether that be a custom script or some open
source project written in Perl). Colocation usage was done by logging byte
counters on switch ports.

This was a small independent ISP with maybe 3-4 sysadmins/network operations
people. Not doing at least that much seems pretty rinky-dink to me. It was
trivial to do that much.

------
lkrubner
My favorite bit of trolling, from 2004, was the "I don't usually link to
blonde jokes, because they are sexist, but this one was really funny..." Such
a very clever bit of trolling.

A few bloggers (most of a feminist mindset) agreed to launch it together, and
they linked to each other. Then several dozen other prominent bloggers joined
in, linking to each other with text, which varied but basically stayed with
the same theme: "Blonde jokes are sexist, so I don't usually promote them, but
this one was really funny..."

So a person reading the first blog would click the link, and go to a second
link where the text was again "I know, I know, I should not promote blonde
jokes, they are sexist, but this one really made me laugh..." and you click
again and again you read "This is the funniest blonde joke that I have ever
read" and you click again and again you read "I hate blonde jokes, but this
one made me laugh out loud..." and you click again...

How many times did you click, before you realized the joke was on you? The
joke was pretty much a test of your social intelligence.

That joke really only worked in the blogosphere of 2000-2006, the era when the
blogosphere was at its peak. I am not sure how anyone could recreate that joke
now.

~~~
nommm-nommm
That's what all the click bait advertisements you see at the bottom of
articles do.

~~~
lkrubner
Not exactly. Those ads are functional. They eventually link to something,
typically something they want to sell to you. And they don't go in a circle.
Instead, the clickbait ads want to get you to go to a specific website. In the
original "I don't usually link to blonde jokes, because they are sexist" if
you clicked enough times you eventually came back to the website where you
started. If you were very, very stupid, then that is when you realized that
there was no blonde joke. The joke was on you. But I would guess that most
people realized there was no blonde joke after they had clicked on maybe a
dozen links or so.

------
jamiethompson
Reminds me of the time when I was running a dating site (before dating sites
were really a thing)

I released some untested code and wound up emailing every user with a huge
email which was essentially a concatenation of every user's email content,
personal information et al.

Much anger was unleashed.

~~~
mod
Probably what, 15 misplaced characters?

Back in these days, dating sites and tested code both weren't things yet,
IIRC.

------
CodeCube
Wow, ton of memories being dredged up by this post and the comments ... good
times :)

I often think back to that time period. He mentions that there was no concept
of social networks back then, but IMO he's totally wrong. I mean, obviously
there weren't any social networks as they exist today, but between the message
board communities, and the massively interlinked personal e/n blogs ... there
very much was a social network. And it was decentralized. For a short time, it
was turning out to be a beautiful thing, especially once RSS started gaining
popularity.

I understand why myspace and facebook took all of that marketshare; it wasn't
easy enough for the average person to put up their own site, and by the time
things like wordpress became popular, every instance was so generic looking
(despite templates) that it was tough to get anyone reading your stuff. There
was a glimmer of hope with things like google's RSS reader, and Google's
social graph API ([https://developers.google.com/social-
graph/](https://developers.google.com/social-graph/)) ... the future could
have been awesome, but alas

~~~
fps
I think the Internet hasn't significantly changed since those days. I think
the difference is that now it's on the publisher to get things in lots of
places, vs before it was on the reader to aggregate all the sources that they
cared about. You still have decentralized publishing, and you still have lots
of disparate reading applications. News Aggregators like Something Awful,
Slashdot and Fark have been superseded (for me) by Reddit and HN. IRC has been
somewhat replaced by Slack, Gitter, Discord. AIM/MSN/ICQ has been replaced by
a dozen other non-interoperable IM systems. BBS systems running on phpBB and
other similar self-hosted tools are still massively popular. Email still chugs
on, almost completely unchanged. I feel like Facebook solves the issue of a
single, curated application platform that a user isn't expected to leave -
what AOL/Prodigy/CompuServe used to do.

I agree, I preferred some of the old technologies, as they seemed more open
with a lower barrier to entry, but I don't think the future is particularly
bleak.

------
kordless
> my massively inflated sense of self-importance from all of the blog posts,
> links, phone calls, and emails that continued to pour in clouded my
> judgement

This is brilliant insight. I appreciate this site contributed to better
understanding what a reality without trust would look like.

------
gourou
The code snipped at the end had me cracking up

~~~
mst
I was mostly incredibly happy to see ancient perl code that didn't use
prototypes or fail 'use strict'.

------
owyn
It was so easy to register weird domain names back then. Our contribution was
satan.com. The guy who owned the domain name eventually sold it and it goes
nowhere now. For a few years in the late 90's the entire site was just a badly
drawn MS Paint image:

[http://web.archive.org/web/19980625181403/http://www.satan.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/19980625181403/http://www.satan.com/)

Clicking on that was a mailto: link that sent mail to an internal mailing list
that we had. Got some good laughs from it but we could never figure out what
to do with it. The archives are still floating around somewhere...

------
marze
The internet was nothing if not hyper free speech back then.

So ironic that this shows up now, during the internet's "let's scrub out the
fake news" phase.

------
gumby
It was bittersweet to see Lester haines' name on that Register link. Lester
passed away last summer -- he was an inspired writer and a jewel of the 21st
century incarnation of The Register. The link must have been one of his early
pieces and not up to his eventual standards.

------
oldsj
I love that Joe Rogan took the time to email you about this but didn't catch
on that it was a joke

------
jhobag
[http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html](http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html)

"Should I be concerned about Dihydrogen Monoxide?"

classic

------
djhworld
This was a really fun read, thanks. I first made it onto the web in 1999,
those were the days!

------
tomcam
I will respect HN when a site making similar fun of Islam hits the front page

------
_audakel
Wow..... Just went to the site he mentioned (rotten.com). I nearly threw up. I
thought I had a decent stomach for stuff but that is fucked up. Sorry for the
click bait sounding comment but I am disturbed after a few of the pics. I have
no words.

~~~
nommm-nommm
Wow, I'm surprised rotten.com is still up; it was the web's original shock
site (that and goatse). I remember it being pretty viral around 1996. Well, as
viral as a website could get in 1996.

I am going to go ahead and assume that there's much more terrible shit on the
web nowadays. 1996's Rotten.com is probably pretty tame by today's standards.

Back on the original topic, I remember another early satire site that was
taken seriously and created very real outrage, Bonsai Kitten.

~~~
aphextron
>Wow, I'm surprised rotten.com is still up

Really? I'm sure the domain alone is a cash machine.

~~~
nommm-nommm
Yes, I am surprised; the majority of the early web outside of major companies
has either link rotted or turned into major companies. Especially those for
niche topics.

Look at the top websites from before the turn of the century:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2014/12...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2014/12/15/from-lycos-to-ask-jeeves-to-facebook-tracking-
the-20-most-popular-web-sites-every-year-since-1996/)

I doubt CompuServe.com or geocities.com is a cash machine.

That being said, rotten.com might actually be owned by a bigger parent company
for all I know.

------
Asooka
Well that site DEFINITELY falls foul of the Net Authority guidelines.
Suggesting that NA isn't real, smh.

