I Hate Catfish Profiles On The Internet

The idea of Catfish on SW has always been an odd dynamic to me. Everyone knows they are here, and just about all people complain about catfish here. That seems to be the accepted truth. However, the weird part is that when people call out a catfish, users here suddenly have some sort of morality flip in which calling out a catfish is a heinous act. It is very odd to me. Of course if you are a popular member here and you call out a catfish, it is perceived as less of a travesty to do as such. Although, the more well known and possibly well liked the catfish in question is, the more egregious the act of calling them out turns out to be, which is also interesting.

It just seems like such a peculiarity to me. I mean, admins here tried to make a whole system to verify that people are who they say they are, surely at the large request of users here due to the amount of catfish, yet this system was then ridiculed beyond mercy, and now we sit in the same place as we were before.

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FaeLuna · 31-35, F

My take on this is that no one likes seeing the obvious fake profiles, because they're just annoying and not very interesting. So they complain that there's a lot of them. And then finding out someone you actually enjoyed interacting with was a catfish the whole time is a bit of a shock, like a kid learning the truth about Santa or the Tooth Fairy. So that's why they get upset when someone gets called out - they're disappointed and don't want to admit they've been fooled by them. On the other hand, if they're actually not a catfish, then throwing false accusations around just creates a metaphorical witch hunt scenario where the accusations mean nothing after awhile, and it's just as annoying as the complaining.