The Portal 2 Flu
Holy shit, the Internet is terrifying. Late Monday night/Tuesday morning, sleep-deprived me decided to post a joke intended only to tick off a close friend of mine. When I woke up, my story was the #1 story on Reddit. As of today, it’s been seen by probably tens of thousands of people.
Some backstory:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that on Monday, Valve Software released Portal 2 after a rather large hype campaign that included a lengthy ARG and a long countdown to an early release. Monday night, Zach and I watched the countdown from a local bar and were extremely excited when the game finally launched. I had pointed out several times throughout the night that I had only one class in the early morning, and that after that, I’d have all day to play Portal. Zach, of course, had several classes all throughout the day and wouldn’t have an extended period of time to play at all.
After leaving the bar and going back to our separate dorm rooms, I had a funny idea to troll Zach: imply that my only class of the day had actually been cancelled by the professor. I hastily typed out an e-mail (leaving in a grammatical error that one Redditor called “the mental equivalent of hitting a pothole”), mailed it to myself and posted the screenshot to Twitter. A few friends responded to it, but it was 1:00am, and I assumed that was as far as it would go.
When I woke up the next morning to go to class (yes, the class I said was cancelled), I got a push notification from a friend of mine about a tweet that said simply “your portal email just made it to front page of reddit !!” Uh-oh.
I checked my Twitter client, and noticed that I had a ton of mentions from people doing old-style retweets of my tweet (I don’t get push notifications from people I don’t follow, or I’d have never slept). I then checked my Favstar page and was shocked to see that my tweet had already been retweeted over a hundred times.
Then I headed over to the Reddit post about my e-mail and checked out what was going on there (I’ve been a frequent reader of Reddit for almost 2 years). When I saw that it was the #1 post on the entire site, I knew it was too late for me to try and stop the story. I did the only thing I could: I played along. I jumped into the thread and answered a few questions, and responded to a few jokes about my last name, but didn’t try to add any more details, or even confirm its authenticity.
Aside: a long thread in the post concerned the fact that another Redditor had posted the e-mail instead of me, and that he should be “lynched” for “stealing my karma”. When said poster tried to defend himself, he got downvoted to hell and ended up deleting the entire post. That’s just depressing. Reddit is all about posting links from other places on the Internet, and this poor guy just got trashed only because the “content” creator (me) happened to be a fellow Redditor.
After that, the e-mail got passed around on various other small sites like The Daily What and The Escapist. The friend I’d intended to troll posted an article on our college’s new “gossip blog”, Engineer Insider. But after the Reddit post was deleted, things seemed to slow down. By this morning, it seemed the whole thing had blown over.
…Until around 4:30pm. At that time, I got an e-mail from Winda Benedetti, introducing herself as a reporter for MSNBC, telling me that she had posted an article about the whole mess. That was the story that broke the camel’s back. Twitter was one thing. A popular but deleted Reddit post was similar. But a front-page article on a major media outlet? Now I (not to mention my unnamed professor) was in real danger of facing disciplinary action from the University over my joke. It had to stop here.
So, I’m posting this in the hopes that it’ll at least stop the flow of new articles about my e-mail, since I know there’s no way I can undo the whole thing. If you see someone post it new, please comment on the page, linking to this post. I apologize to everyone who wanted to believe in my story, but it’s just not true. Mea culpa.
