Disinformation in action

It's fascinating to watch the way rumours start and facts change and reform before your very eyes when you have a little society right there in front of you. Because I work behind the scenes at the Mortgage Grapevine I know a little too much about what goes on. Sometimes it's hard because I know that the same person is really hateful and really kind under two different names. When I get requests to ban the hateful persona I know the same person complaining would be terribly upset if the persona they liked couldn't post anymore.

But what's really interesting is the way these sort of myths happen. I was just looking at a thread saying that there is no new server and maybe we will get one when the company is sold. The company was sold on the 8th and as I told the person who posted, via email, we did get a new server and the motherboard was fried and the whole thing went kerflooey when it was first booted up. Webmaster posted the same thing but somehow this thing about no new server carries more weight.

I saw something a couple of months ago that said that we had a huge server crash and lost all the titles to the threads. I have no idea where that one came from but I'm sure plenty of people believe it,

The really amazing thing to me is the myth of this highly annoying person who was finally banned for disrupting the flow of the Vine. Several times a week someone says this guy was banned for posting ads. Now mind you he has been gone for more than a year but I guess they need something to talk about.

The fact is this guy used to do things like post the word stop eleventyseven times infinity in a row. Andras had made the mistake of making a list of threads this guy posted in and the banned guy used to repost that list into threads where people said he didn't contribute. The thing is the list was something like 27,000 links long and on dialup sitting and waiting for that to load when it served no useful purpose was a kind of hell. I'm surprised people didn't simply go and lynch this guy. Those are just a couple of the things he did. I've only ever warned two people for disruption in the entire history of the Vine. And yet the other members of the community are totally convinced that the final warning, which I posted, was for posting ads.

So when I see people talking about how the prison abuses in Iraq mean nothing and I wonder how they can say such a thing after reading what I read I have to realize that humans have the ability to totally reinvent what they see and hear and read very quickly. Aren't people amazingly great?