this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
578 points (99.8% liked)
Microblog Memes
10400 readers
1922 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If a post is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Be nice. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So in a fucked up way, those TikTok kids swallowing Tide pods a few years ago are smarter than Gemini recommending “yummy button mushrooms”?
No. They did less damage to themselves, but they were eating something that they knew was very obviously not food for a social media "challenge". Trusting the wrong source and attempting to eat food is very slightly smarter.
They mostly weren't eating them, just making staged videos of themselves doing something dumb the way teenagers have ever since they got access to cameras. The problem is that biting into one and spitting it out again can be enough to kill you as laundry detergent can corrode your tongue and throat in seconds and it's very easy to inhale liquid throat. The media reported it as teens eating tide pods, which made staging fake eating tide pod videos using a real tide pod as a prop seem like a fun idea for even more teenagers. If the media had been a little more responsible, then they could have got the message across that something more dangerous than it seemed was dangerous instead of telling people something obviously dangerous that hadn't happened was dangerous.
I appreciate the context, but I just want to point out that you're blaming "the media" for people putting laundry detergent in their mouth. I did dumb teenage things, yet even I feel qualified to say how knowingly stupid that is, especially for the payoff of... online validation?
The average person can be surprisingly dumb. The average teenager can be ludicrously much dumber. Dumb teenagers can be even dumber still. If the warning on the packet says do not eat but not do not put in mouth and warnings on packets generally tell you not to do things everyone knows would be dangerous, it doesn't take much dumbness to come to the conclusion that it's fine as long as you don't swallow any.