I wrote multiple posts about the game I currently play, World of Warships. Several of them ( 1 3 ) needed stupid amount of data processed to measure something that bothers the players a lot. The ranked play of the game – besides the usual “win and progress, lose and fall back” – contains a mechanic that rewards the best player of the losing team by not falling back on ranking. This is made to motivate players to keep fighting if their team is behind. According to a widespread belief in the community, there are a large group of exploiters who play in a way that optimize their chance to be first among losers at the expense of team win chance. So they progress when the team can carry them and don’t fall back when they are too much to carry.

So after processing available data, I concluded that there is no significant group with the signature of these exploiters (low win rate, high experience points which determine who is considered best). I linked my posts on the subreddit (1, 2, 3) of the game and got downvoted and trolled, because I questioned their beautiful conspiracy theory that “explained” why they can’t get good rank. Finally I was accused by mods that I just want to drive traffic to my blog for money, despite the blog doesn’t even have monetization. Then – when I attempted to reasonably discuss another game feature, I was banned from their subreddit for “being toxic”.

Instead of crying somewhere, I decided to teach them a lesson by creating a troll post (archive). I created a throwaway account and posted completely fake statistics that tell them what they want to hear: that exploiting is widespread and this is why they can’t get good rank. The plan was simple: let them upvote, celebrate and join the fake account in abusing me and then reveal the troll and make them look stupid. To make it more embarrassing, I placed multiple clues in the post:

The first letters of each paragraph in my text comment spelled “BULLSHIT”

I linked the original dataset which was actually the lyrics of the song “Never gonna give you up” by Rick Astley.

I put “Fake News” watermark to the right top corner of the chart

The scientific discussion made no sense even if the data was true: I was talking about “standard deviation of correlation” (which is nonsense, but also one upvoted comment that some random fool used to criticize my real post) and also talked about damage which wasn’t present on the chart

The post contained lots of abuse for the real me which is unscientific

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Then something completely unexpected happened which turned some laughter at the expense of some morons and slackers into something much more valuable: some of my clues were found. Pretty soon someone checked the original data and later the “BULLSHIT” was found. But the obviously worthless and misleading post was not removed or at least downvoted and flamed, it rose to the top and it remained on the first page for a day: Its reddit statistics:

107 (73% upvoted), 8.4k views. Also, my only comment (the fake discussion text) got 88 karma. Let’s compare it to my real posts about the same topic:

0 karma (43% upvoted), 659 views

0 karma (30% upvoted), 1.2kviews

0 karma (16% upvoted), 977views