The internet has brought us a lot of good things. It’s like having a library at your fingertips. You can shop from the comfort of your home. But there is also questionable stuff like the rise of internet fame .
Now anybody can get millions of people watching and listening to them. Some people take this new-found popularity in stride, and others let it go to their heads . Let’s see some examples of the latter and have a good laugh.
RELATED STORIES
This AOL King
“Man, this is a deep cut. 25 years ago, back in the AOL days, I learned how to manipulate my profile so that I could add different categories and more lines than usual. I made mine into a ‘quiz’ with nonsensical (and, really) not that funny answers. I still have a copy of it and just took another look at it (with much cringe) but 25 years ago I thought it was the greatest thing ever, and every trip to a ‘Rate My Profile’ room would only confirm my delusions. It was a plethora of messages to me like ’10/10′ and ‘How do you do this???!!!?’ I thought that I was the King of AOL profiles and wasn’t afraid to let people know. Then AOL died. It was sad. So glad I grew out of that.”
How did he do that?
This Delusion
“A classmate of mine got invited to a pyramid scheme through Instagram. She started planning her entire influencer career. Got real mad when I wrote an extensive explanation on what a pyramid scheme is, and showed her I’d gotten dozens of those DM’s before.”
Ugh, I hate those kinds of DMs.
This Reddit Star
“When people get a highly upvoted/top comment on Reddit and come back and edit it 20 times with additional commentary as they are now the world’s authority on the situation. Dude, they were just upvotes. We weren’t asking for an encore or anything.
EDIT: Wow! This really blew up! TY so much! I mean, it didn’t “blow up” blow up, but it did okay, I guess. It’s no myspace-survey-on-my-resume-level comment, that’s for sure, but a girl can dream.”
EDIT2: Thanks for all the recommends to r/AwardSpeechEdits , I wasted a whole hour on that this morning when I should have done other things. So my clients would like to thank you, and the Academy, as well.”
And the edits just continued, haha. Nice. Proved his point!
This Compliment
“I used to play World of Warcraft in my early 20s. Now, I was good – I set records and [expletive] (OK just once!) – but I wasn’t really a household name or whatever. I was, however, the highest-ranked person in my class on the server. So once, while I did my heroic daily, and I got matched up with another person from my class, he opined: ‘No [expletive], you’re Kysimir! Awesome.’ I gushed over this for probably a week. I clearly still remember it too, so there’s that.”
We all have moments like that.
This Power Trip
“This dude created a forum for our anime club. He appointed the people he liked as mods and then they came up with this weird currency, very similar to Reddit gold, and tried to use it to lord over me. Like. What? It was very Schrute Bucks.
Edit: There were only like 7 of us on the forum too.”
I hate when people do that.
This Follow-Back
“I have like 160 followers on Twitter but every time someone looks at them, they’re like, ‘Wait why does Dionne Warwick follow you??’Tw
I say it’s because I do good tweets. But that’s not true- it’s because one day she was giving follow-backs for people voting in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She follows me but she has never once interacted!”
The same thing happened to me with Matt Dusk. I was like “wow, he followed me” only to realize his account was probably just doing automatic follows and unfollows. There goes that.
This Scheme
“Back in high school I commented on a Childish Gambino Instagram post and it got a like from the account. I proceeded to tell every single person in my class; my friends were singing my praises: that’s so cool, wow THE Childish Gambino, you probably got the biggest celebrity acknowledgment via social media, etc. I find out later it was a Childish Gambino fan account with the same profile pic that liked my comment. I never told anyone.”
Your secret is safe with us.
This Come-Back
“Years ago, before Reddit, there was USENET and rec.humor.funny. I told a story there about my older son that became enormously popular. This went to his head, as in his mind he was famous on the internet.
“Sometime later he and I were driving with his younger brother when the two of them got into some kind of ridiculous argument. The older tried to end the conversation with ‘well, at least I’m famous on the internet.’ The younger looked at him with complete disdain and replied ‘yeah, that’s right – you’re famous for being an idiot.'”
I love that.
This Pokémon Goddess
“An Ex of mine ran a Pokémon RP forum in the late 2000s, even designed the art for Fakemons of her own and coded the site and everything. And boy howdy, did she think she was an absolute GOD to the like, 6 people that used that forum. Nobody even inflated her ego about it, it was as if she had stuck a bicycle pump directly to her head and never stopped pumping.
“In a non-negative context, she really did put A LOT of effort into the site and art and lore and I understand why she was disappointed all that work never amounted to anything but she took everything as an almost literal, purposeful attack on her digital baby. Her one Mod wasn’t present for the site’s official Launch Date and you’d have thought the Mod tossed her dog off a bridge. Again, she had every right to be proud of the work she put in, honestly, it was pretty great and took a lot of time and dedication- but it really, really went to her head and ego. Hell, I even got scolded for not attending opening day- a date I wasn’t even told about.”
Yikes! I kind of feel bad for her.
These YouTube Delusions
“I used to answer the unsolicited submissions email box for a very large consumer products company – basically the address where people sent in ideas, be they marketing or products or whatever. I can’t tell you the number of people who tried to sell us a license to their ‘hit viral song’ that had ‘nearly 10,000 views on YouTube.’ I appreciate the hustle but no one is paying to use a song with 10,000 YouTube plays. That is not ‘viral’ or ‘famous.'”
I bet the rejection must’ve stung, huh?
This Bad Behavior
“Most of the moderators on the Rupauls Dragrace sub think they are Gods and will treat you like trash and ban you for absolutely nothing. They will even message you to insult you and then mute you lol. It’s pretty sad, you can tell being a mod on a small little sub on Reddit has really gone to their heads. None of the queens associate with it for that very reason.”
That’s not nice.
This Rock ‘n Roll Dream
“There’s a girl locally in a small band. The sort of small local band even local people don’t know the name of, but about 7 years ago she opened up for a few c list acts at nearby venues. There were a few YouTube videos that got a decent amount of traction. Not loads, but maybe 100,000 views or so. She got a few messages (2 or 3) on Facebook from ‘fans.’
“So she changed her name on Facebook to stay anonymous. She hasn’t even played anything now for a couple of years but anytime anyone talks to her about anything it’s all ‘I have to work so hard to protect myself and make sure to never use my real name with people till I trust them.’
“I get the fake name on Facebook thing. No judgment from me for that. Plenty of teacher friends do similar, but it’s the constant monologue of ‘I’m such a public figure, people will stalk me, I’m such a celebrity, I have to shop online’ when actually, no one knows or cares.”
The delusion is real, folks!
This Truthful Admission
“I used to run a Reddit live stream that I thought was very very good at the time and have since deleted record of because it was cringe. I basically went around and bragged to my friends, family, therapist, and dog about this Reddit live stream.
“A guy I went to college with, sorta friends with but at the time not really, I told him about it and he laughed and was like ‘bro are you bragging about your Reddit live right now?’ And I had a moment where I was like, yeah, I guess I am. Then another like, oh god I am aren’t I?
“And I realized how much of an [expletive] I sounded like. It honestly was the most the internet has changed my life and it only lasted about a month.”
At least you realized it. Better late than never, hehe.
This Aspiring Starlet
“This girl I went to school with was an… aspiring actress. She was in some low-quality YouTube short film and she basically was trying to convince everyone that she was famous and that all these companies wanted her because of it. She even had these headshots that she would bring into class to show everyone… and nobody cared. She really thought she was better than everyone and even acted like a celebrity. Like she would come in with sunglasses and basically treat everyone as if they shouldn’t even be breathing the same air as her. It was honestly sad.”
Wow!
This Rapper
“My cousin is actually a semi-big rapper now (41mil+ streams on one song and 500k+ monthly listeners) after one of his songs blew up on TikTok, but my God his lyrics are absolutely hilarious if you know him in real life.
“You don’t wanna [expletive] with me and my crew.”
“My God, you went to an all-boys catholic high school and are in a Baylor fraternity, your ‘ crew’ is the goddamn lacrosse team.”
Haha!
This Claim To Fame
“The guy who turned Keanu Reeves calling him breathtaking once at a cyberpunk showcase into his entire brand, even making merch about the situation.”
OMG, what? That’s totally hilarious. I had to look this dude up. He really did let it get to his head, haha.
This Show-Off
“My friend’s family immigrated from the USSR. He was born and raised in the US and went into the military. After some time in the service, like everyone else, gets a ton of participation ribbons. Those ribbons would go to his head. He would walk around in dress uniform when he was off duty and people would walk up to him and thank him for his service, never mind that the only time he saw bullets fly was in training.”
“One day, he decides to visit his grandparents in his dress uniform. His grandfather looks at him and said ‘son, I fought from Stalingrad to Berlin and got one ribbon. How many planets did you have to invade to get all those ribbons?’ After that, he never wore his dress uniform out in public again.”
Serves him right, no?
This Job Title
“In my experience, if you have to put ‘Influencer’ in your bio… you aren’t an influencer at all.”
“I agree, and I personally don’t even hate ‘influencer’ as a job, I just think the job title makes you sound like a wanker. The job itself is fine. If someone’s found a way to make money and a job out of it and doesn’t get said money by endorsing unethical products, there’s no problem, power to ‘em (sp). But for the love of god, put the word ‘influencer’ in the bin!”
Haha, I get that.
Wow! What did I tell you?
It’s funny how easily things like so-called internet fame can go to somebody’s head. Am I right? If only these people would realize how ridiculous they’re acting, huh? I guess that’s just too much to ask, hehe. Well, one day, they will find out, and hopefully, they’ll cut it out. Or they might just never let this one go. Either way, good luck to them.
