NFT Fakery? No! Impossible!

June 2, 2022

It is smart to never believe everything you watch or read on the Internet, especially when it comes to non-fungible tokens (NFTs). If you were not aware, NFTS are digital pieces of property with a value determined by their scarcity and creator. Weird ape portrait NFTs went viral when they made their creator a billionaire. We believed the ape NFTs had drifted into meme history, when a news story about an ever weirder dating app surfaced. Buzzfeed explains the details in, “The Bored Ape Dating That Shut Down Because No Women Signed Up Was Just a Prank, Folks.”

The Twitter user @y4kxyz tweeted that the dating app for owners of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs was shut down because of the disproportional amount of men to women who signed up. It perpetuated the idea that NFTs are only valued by stereotypical lonely males and it was funny. The entire dating app was a joke, but it appeared real enough that some news outlets ran the story:

“Sadly, it isn’t true. It was all a joke. The app never existed in the first place, so it couldn’t have been shut down because there were no women. It was a funny prank — a good joke, a great one, even. The confirmation bias that NFTs are for sad men is strong enough that this tricked a few news outlets into reporting it as if it were real.”

The Buzzfeed article author believed the NFT dating app was a fake and contacted the creator for information. A few months passed, then the joke story about the app shutting down went viral. The dating app creator and the author spoke with the former more or less confirming the entire thing was a prank.

NFT fans were not the only targets. The others were people with a “right-clicker mentality,” referring to how Windows users can simply right click on an image to save a copy.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club dating app was not a bad prank. No one was hurt. It did not start a social justice warrior war. It did not break the Internet and one rioted in the street.

Whitney Grace, June 2, 2022

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under cybercrime, News

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.