Reddit. Reddit is why I went and looked into koalas.

The three animal copy pastas, sunfish, koalas, and pandas just pissed me off because people started parroting the shit irl. They're all funny enough when everyone knows they're jokes based on bullshit, but people are stupid.

So, I went looking for more information. For the sunfish and pandas, there were already better anti-pastas available that came up after quick searches.

Not for koalas. I did find some later, after I made the initial comment, but when I first wrote up the parts I did, I couldn't find any. I later edited in links to the better counters when I discovered them.

But, for real, once I started hearing people wanting to charter a boat to go and find sunfish to throw rocks at, I started fuming. Same with the people that started opposing conservation efforts to pandas and koalas because of the bullshit in the copy pastas. Treating some text meme like educational material is just too damn much.

So, for years on reddit, I'd throw down the anti-pastas when they came up. Here on lemmy, I thought they had failed to follow people, but the last few months I've started seeing references to them again. I'm glad I didn't delete the files for them.