I’ve recently been trolling the subreddit r/AmITheAsshole.(Known as AITA for short.) AITA was 2022’s most popular subreddit, so many of my trolls got lots of engagement.(Usually 10-100 comments, and in one case over 4,000.)
You need to do a meta-AITA: "am I an asshole for writing dozens of fake AITAs and trying to fool thousands of people, or am I not because by doing so & claiming credit for it I am helping teach people why they shouldn't believe anything like that on social media because there are people like me out there?"
That's my immediate thought as well. People who make other people angry for a living have been justifiably reviled from the internet since the beginning.
As a reader of ACX, you will also recognise that your arguments that "normies" are members of the outgroup, therefore they deserve what's coming for them, is weak. I – not being a normie – am a member of your ingroup, and hereby shame you into conformity with better social norms.
As for most forum ethics questions, there is a wikipedia policy addressing the problem:
You need to do a meta-AITA: "am I an asshole for writing dozens of fake AITAs and trying to fool thousands of people, or am I not because by doing so & claiming credit for it I am helping teach people why they shouldn't believe anything like that on social media because there are people like me out there?"
That's my immediate thought as well. People who make other people angry for a living have been justifiably reviled from the internet since the beginning.
As a reader of ACX, you will also recognise that your arguments that "normies" are members of the outgroup, therefore they deserve what's coming for them, is weak. I – not being a normie – am a member of your ingroup, and hereby shame you into conformity with better social norms.
As for most forum ethics questions, there is a wikipedia policy addressing the problem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_disrupt_Wikipedia_to_illustrate_a_point