Start a rumor or conspiracy theory on the internet!
 

Been a while since we had one of these.

Goal is to purposefully create a convincing rumor, conspiracy theory, or urban legend to spread across the internet.

I'll go first:

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So recently I learned the horrifying truth about the free "paper shredding" events being hosted in my local area. The idea is that a paper shredding truck parks itself in the parking lot of a local business as part of a community event and you can bring all your sensitive documents to be shredded free of charge. They pretend this is to help prevent identity theft (and promote their business of mobile shredding to large corporations with tons of sensitive paperwork), but I know what's really going on:

Your sensitive documents? They aren't shredded. They're just collected in the back of the truck before being delivered directly to Homeland Security, where their teams of experts sort out your papers into appropriate piles, some to the NSA, others to the CIA, the FBI. Your tax forms? Bank statements? They go straight to the IRS.

Don't be fooled by this supposed "free" or "communal" event. It's an insidious plot by the government to steal from you. Not your identity. YOUR FREEDOM.

Spread the word!

No see, they shred them and recycle the paper sure. But not before a mini scanner records the image and sends it straight to a database open only to the secret government seeking to control your freedom.

Lets start one that doesn't involve feeding ammunition to the people that make us hate our own humanity on a daily basis

No.

By the way, I heard Obama's a cactus. I mean, look at the guy. If it walks, talks, and acts like a cactus, it's a cactus. I mean, seriously.

Actually Eco-Terrorists pay them money to purposefully burn the paper instead of shredding it. With gasoline. In order to bring about an artificial pollution and energy crisis in conjunction with their true Saudi overlords.

Then Be a little more creative then "The government is bad and can't be trusted" There are already millions of those to go around

I'm pretty sure going with the flow makes it more believable, Marc. You can't get 30% of the population to believe in lizard aliens that secretly control the world. It's just absurd. If you wanna come up with a good original one, go for it, that's the point of the thread!

(By the way, if you guys wanna keep talking about all the evidence you have on our lizard alien overlords please PM me with your names, addresses, and photographs so we can...be pen pals.)

The new Oasis skin for Wikia is Wikia's way of trying to become the next Facebook. Seriously, it looks a lot like Facebook. Also, it discourages the editors from making long articles to save on database space. Keeping the text area fixed to only 660 pixels wide (subtracting six does nothing to hide your evil ways!) means less horizontal space, which means space gets pushed vertically. Then they're adding a horizontal bar on the bottom to help eat some of that up. Vertical space is the precious stuff and people hate scrolling, so articles are going to get shorter and shorter until the term "stub" has to be redefined. At the same time, they're adding a large sidebar next to the actual page and will be filling it with junk. They're trying to take the focus away from the articles and put it on all the stuff they'll have in there. Sooner or later, it's going to be filled with apps. Then nobody is going to care about the articles, since there's jack shit in them anyway. Oh, and it's on the right. That means that reading articles is going to naturally lead your gaze to it.

Once they have the importance of articles killed, they'll introduce a proper profile system. Users' pages will be converted to it and their freedom to customize their info will be limited. They'll be nice though, and have more room than the articles.

It all will lead to the articles losing their importance and profiles becoming the main attraction. The articles will still be there, but the people who edit them will be the fringe minority.

Soon enough, it'll be just another successful social site.