[TriNetra]

Back in 2013, as part of my consultancy services, I built a simple email support site for a client, whose most difficult part was just a background job (mailman) that would need to pull emails from different providers and send emails through them, as per replied by this client's support reps. The customer wanted a sort of custom service rather than using Zendesk or something, because he was providing a "outsourced support services" to his clients. I charged only $950 to build the initial version, but charged monthly maintenance which started from $300 something, and over the months/years went onto $840+ monthly. Mostly, it was Mailman that would require some tweaks re error handling/retry logic, as there were weird errors I would see from different providers once in a while. However, the code would work flawlessly and for months I didn't even need to check it at all.

So, yes it's possible IMO, just that you need to be in a right situation at the right time with the mindset of a hacker (the one who wants to make machine works for him), you can achieve something like this.

[PragmaticPulp]

> So, yes it's possible IMO,

All of these highly-upvoted Reddit stories have the same few things in common:

1) They're vague enough to be possible. If it's too outlandish, people will call it out.

2) Verifiable or falsifiable specifics are conveniently omitted. This is easy to justify due to the anonymity.

3) They have an element of good guy versus bad guy, where the reader can empathize with the person telling the story but can also accept the counterparty (the company, boss, whatever) as the "bad guy" without feeling bad about it. These subreddits are built on the premise that companies and bosses are bad, so anything that fits that narrative is welcomed without question.

Basically, the stories are vague enough that they can't be falsified, but there are so many of them with so many convenient details falling perfectly in to place for the poster that it's extremely unlikely that all, or even most, of them are real stories. In the past, people would dig through the Reddit poster's history and often find conflicting posts (e.g. someone claiming to be a programmer in one post, then claiming to be unemployed somewhere else), but lately Reddit is such high-volume and fast-moving that nobody really cares to check anything. If it sounds good, it gets an upvote.

Take it all with a grain of salt. It may sound plausible or "truthy", but you never know which stories are real and which are just someone's creative writing exercise.

[apocolyps6]

You find it suspicious that most of the stories that become popular are appealing as stories and are the sort of stories people tend to tell? Is it also suspicious that they are all in English?

I'm sure some of them are fake, but so what? Let people have their plausible mundane lies. Sometimes my girlfriend lies about her name to the Starbucks barista and she hasn't been called out for it yet.

[CRConrad]

> people would dig through the Reddit poster's history and often find conflicting posts (e.g. someone claiming to be a programmer in one post, then claiming to be unemployed somewhere else)

Eh... So unemployed people can't become programmers, or programmers unemployed?

[johnnyanmac]

>but you never know which stories are real and which are just someone's creative writing exercise.

my simple rebuttal to this is: what do I have to lose here if I find out that some reddit post is false, but still true enough to inspire more-likely-to-be-true stories? This isn't exactly misinformation that can cost lives.

Everything should be taken with a grain of salt. I don't find this post to be exceptional in that case.

[tikhonj]

I mean, if I were running a small business and needed to run my own Mailman instance, I would pay those prices—or even substantially more!—in a heartbeat. And I'm technical enough that I could manage Mailman myself.

It sounds like you were clearly representing the service you were providing, so it's a bit of a different story.