Storytelling, Bullshit, and r/ThatHappened
As the internet reaches nearly every person in the developed world, it has started to become an indistinguishable part of people’s lives rather than an extension. People now share things with anonymous strangers online that before were mostly shared amongst friends or nearby strangers who were willing to listen. Such things include photos, art, conspiracy theories, ideas, and what we’ll be focusing on — stories. Before we get into how the internet factors into this, I should introduce how stories get warped in the first place.
Many stories that we tell or are told have been slightly distorted from the truth. It simply keeps things more interesting. That’s why many movies are “based on” a true story. When it comes to personal storytelling, everyone has warped the truth at least a little at some point or another. You might have a hilarious story to tell, but the ending just barely misses the mark of being perfectly eye-wateringly funny, how much is that tiny shift going to hurt? Of course, not all warping to a story is that subtle, we all know people whose stories all seem a little too out there. While they probably aren’t outright lying, the very implausible seems to happen a little too often.
Along comes the internet. Now you can truly combine storytelling and anonymity for the first time. This story that you tell is going to be the only thing that a few to hundreds of thousands of people will know about you. Now you’ve got stage fright: what if they they don’t care if it isn’t interesting enough, or if it seems like I wasn’t witty enough for the perfect comeback in the moment? The easiest solution for many is to just add that tiny sprinkle of bullshit. It’s not like all your friends will think you’re a serial bullshitter if you’re found out, it’s just some random passerbyers online, who cares? If everyone believes your story, you now have a relatively large number of people out there who think you’re a badass, extremely witty, or utterly irresistible to the opposite sex. The temptation to warp a story is much stronger online, as there is little definitive way for skeptics to dispute the story, and you don’t face the typical social repercussions if your peers find out you stretched the truth.
People began catching onto the prevalence of these bullshit stories online, and communities were made to admire the ridiculousness of the worst offenders. The community that I’ll be focusing on today is the subreddit r/ThatHappened. The point of this subreddit is to post ridiculous stories from around the internet so that they can be subsequently made fun of. The range of content on the subreddit is quite wide, but there are some very common themes and patterns amongst the posts that get upvoted the most. I was curious as to what type of bullshit stories performed the best on the subreddit, and how bullshit each type of story generally was.
To analyze the content on the subreddit, I created a spreadsheet where I noted a few distinct qualities about the contents of the top 25 posts of all time on the subreddit. I noted the original website from the bullshit post, the category that the fake story fell into, and the subjectively-determined level of bullshit displayed in the story on a scale of 1–5 (1 being least bullshit, 5 being most). All of the posts in the top 25 fell into 6 distinct categories: Intelligence, Sex, Strength, Religion, Relatability, and Music. I graded the level of bullshit in each post based on how much of the original story seemed like it could’ve been completely made up. 1 being that there is basically nothing made up in the story, 3 being that some aspects of the story probably happened but were changed or exaggerated, and 5 being completely separated from reality.
First up, I wanted to do some analysis of the websites featured in the sample I took.
Then I got the average level of bullshit from each website to see which sites had the worst offending bullshit posts.
The average for most of the websites hovered near bullshit level 4, with Steam getting off easy because the lone sample wasn’t that bullshit. Interestingly, despite Twitter having the most total posts, their bullshit level was the 2nd lowest. My initial takeaway after reading some of the tweets is that they are very obviously exaggerated, but they don’t seem completely made up. The obviousness of the exaggeration is probably what garnered it so many upvotes, despite it not being a super egregious offender in the bullshit category. There is a mostly even spread across the most common websites, so it doesn’t really indicate any bias amongst the websites which the Reddit users upvote.
Next, I was curious as to which category of story was the most bullshit.
Then which of these categories contained the highest level of bullshit
Stories involving strength are consistently the most bullshit, with sex and intelligence following closely behind. These 3 categories are the most “personal” of the 6, and you can definitely imagine that someone would be more likely to exaggerate their intelligence, sexual prowess, or strength in a story. I believe relatability has the lowest average bullshit level because if something were way too out there, it would inherently not be relatable. Hence, it seemed like a lot of the stories in the relatability category had a strong basis in reality, with minor exaggerations made to really make the story stand out.
Something to keep in mind is that this data doesn’t give an accurate broad indication of which website tells the most bullshit stories, or even which category contains the most bullshit. The most accurate conclusion to draw from this data is what r/ThatHappened generally enjoys enough to upvote the most.
