A user on hacker news years ago put it well like this:

"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011498

That's a variation of Poe's law:

"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

It is a corollary but it is an application to people in large numbers.

Since, in the long term, there is always less people in on the joke than new followers, you are guaranteed that the community is going to be taken over in the end.

Isn't this how the whole flat-earth thing started?

That’s certainly what happened.

4chans version:

"Ironic shitposting is still shitposting"

No, the original version is actually the 4chan version. "Ironic shitposting is still shitposting" is the distilled version we started using later.

Edit: Ok, I stand corrected. After checking it turns out the HN post is probably the source. It's just I saw it posted in its original form on 4chan most often.

Interesting! For many years on 4chan, that quote can be seen in a daily basis and produced hundreds of memes, which trolls and trolls trolling each other for being trolls. But it in fact was actually originated from Hacker News?! Even more interesting, it was originally intended as an exact critique to the 4chan community, but then completely picked up by 4chan and became part of the collective consensus of 4chan, and now ended up as a self-fulfilling prophecy...

I don't like the shitposts or trolling, but always fascinated by them as a social and psychological phenomenon, and the way how idea travels and spreads.

I was going to rain on the parade by saying that that quote is old. But then I saw that it was posted almost 10 years ago and could very well be the source.

That quote is kind of eye opening. Once you think about it and start making connections to the ridiculous hate communities it has given rise to, it's fascinating.

Another variation is what Popehat calls "the Rule of Goats" (easy to google, a bit NSFW).

...and sometimes it is a profitable business.

This is Poe's law corollary.

And I think that, even simply being exposed to the rhetoric will distord your view. Back when the alt-right was appearing on the Internet, I wanted to engage with the other side to get their story. The more I read and argued, and the more close-minded I found myself to become. I put a stop to it.

Deconstructing your interlocutor's arguments forces you to think in the same binary logic, take the same intellectual shortcuts. I absolutely think that reading radicalized thesis will radicalize the reader.

Nietzsche was right about staring into the abyss and battling monsters.

> There should be a name for the phenomenon of a satirical, ironic or trolling community turning into the real deal, by aggregating people taking the issue seriously.

I've wondered if this is how pizzagate got started. When I first read about it, I thought it was hilarious. It was mind boggling to learn that people were serious about it. To me, the theory seemed to be purposely constructed to be ultra ridiculous.

Yes, similarly, I was alarmed to read that qanon type groups gain traction on subreddits like /r/conspiracy. We have a chat channel at work where people post links from that subreddit and joke about it. It’s discomforting to realize we’ve been participating in misleading people by adding to view and subscriber counts.

Same with /r/mandelaeffect. You’d think it was pretty obviously a joke, but I’ve seen posts where people seemed to be dead serious about parallel universe shenanigans.

The lesson here is, don’t create joke or troll communities unless you’d be comfortable with them turning very real.

That's how Reddit's "The Donald" was born. It was basically satire that attracted the real followers and eventually got overrun by them.

> attracted the real followers

And plenty of Russian trolls.

"The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves." ( Lenin )

edit: from https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-controlled-opposition

Except in the case of these user groups, more often than not it seems the thing takes a life of its own and gets out of the creator's hands entirely

It happened to Lenin too, in the end, who became alienated from Stalin and most definitely did not want him to be his successor.

"You become what you pretend to be", or as my grandmother said "if the wind changes, your face will be stuck like that".

I'm almost positive that's exactly the story behind 4chan and shit reddit says.

To me it brings to mind how media like the Daily Show conduct serious discussion and news distribution about politics while ostensibly being a comedy show.

There is Romanian satirical website that has the fact that it is satirical next to it's logo. When they published a joke about the french troops, the "news" were discussed seriously on french TV.

It's an extension of Poe's law. The earnest ones cannot discern satire from their own, so they unironically join in on the irony.