Why do I have the impression that almost all questions about advertising the flat Earth theory come from people who don't believe in a flat Earth themselves and are just provoking?
13.06.2025 05:21
The sheer number of obvious cases casts a lot of doubt on the remaining ones. Flat-eartherism basically didn’t exist before the Internet. It was the archetypal example of people being silly. Which made it perfect for the kinds of exaggerated “stupidity trolling” that flourished on the early (public) Internet.
Well, your belief is true, so that helps.
Why do you think it? Sometimes, because they’re making it obvious. They ratchet up the stupidity level as high as they can, in order to attract the most attention. If you look at their question logs, you’ll see that they are asking many other questions with a similar pattern of being as outrageous as possible, often trolling multiple groups with contradictory assertions.
I’m sure that there are at least a few people being sincerely stupid. The Internet is a remarkable tool for agnotology (the deliberate induction of igorance). But you are correctly discerning that the vast majority of them are deliberately trying to provoke you — and the more provoking it is, the more likely that it’s deliberate.