GuyWithRealFacts Explains The Story Of His Infamous Reddit Account And His Clever Bait-and-Switch Comments

he art of the bait-and-switch technique is one of the most ubiquitous and enduring jokes on the web, but also one of the trickiest to properly execute. Ever since the pervasiveness of the Rickroll, perhaps the most infamous bait-and-switch video of all time, people have steadily become more and more hesitant to trust their fellow online users. While the Rickroll certainly isn’t the only form of this timeless internet joke, for many, it was their first experience with being duped online.

This trolling technique has continued to evolve since then, and over the last few years, Redditors have found themselves the victims of another (harmless) style. Carefully crafting his “facts” by roping people into a plausible intro that slowly descends into absurdity, GuyWithRealFacts has successfully managed to put a unique spin on the bait-and-switch formula by using the internet’s tendency to believe a convincing comment. To better understand how and why he does this, we spoke with GuyWithRealFacts, whose real name is Brian, and asked him all about the story of his now-infamous Reddit account.

(Art by The Critter's Cove)

Q: Hey, Brian. Let’s start with a quick summary of “GuyWithRealFacts.” For those who aren’t familiar with your account and its schtick, can you explain what it is and what you do?

A: Hey! So yeah, I’m GuyWithRealFacts. I frequent a select few subreddits (I’m unfortunately not welcome in every sub anymore) and post super informative, interesting, but totally false facts. I try to write them out so that they start out being totally believable, but for the user who keeps reading, it’ll slowly become apparent that I’m not really to be trusted.

Q: As someone who’s personally fallen for your “facts” several times in the past, let me just say that I hate you. But, anyway, so what’s your background and how did you come up with the idea for the account?

A: I’ve always wanted to write. I’ve always had this creative bug for as far back as I can remember. When I was a kid, I would make my mom sit at the typewriter, and I’d dictate these awful stories to her and she’d type them out for me. She was a good sport about it, too. I asked for an electronic word processor for Christmas one year when I was around 13 or 14 before we had our first family computer — the thing was horrible. It took about five minutes to print out a page and displayed one line of text at a time on screen. I can still remember how the keyboard felt like a sponge where pressing one key kind of made all of the neighboring keys go down with it. But man did I love it. If I could write for a living, that’s what I’d do.

The idea for GuyWithRealFacts came about really organically. I was browsing Reddit one morning before work, and I stumbled upon someone asking a question about zero-turn lawnmowers and why they were called that. I made up this answer about how a zero-turn mower actually couldn’t turn but that was a tradeoff for super high speed. I talked about how the rider would have to get off the mower after every pass across the yard, pick it up by the back and point it where he wanted to go. Then he’d get back on, strap in and rip across the yard at like 40 miles per hour hoping he had “aimed” it right. The post got a few hundred upvotes and the people who recognized it as a joke got a kick out of it. The people who thought that I was being serious called me an idiot.

I had a ton of fun on that post, and that kind of seeded the idea for GuyWithRealFacts (GWRF). A few months later, I was spending a weekend at my in-law’s house and was bored out of my mind late one night, so I made the account and made a few posts over the course of the weekend trying to relive that “zero-turn mower” moment.

Q: Were you inspired by any earlier individuals, such as Shittymorph, or bait-and-switch videos, like Rickrolling, that use a similar setup and style to your concept?

A: Yep, Shittymorph. He’s a super genuine and nice guy. It’s funny because now you can go to pretty much any one of my posts, and I can promise there’s a comment along the lines of “I thought this was going to end with the Undertaker throwing Mankind off Hell in a Cell For a while, people kept asking if I was him … man, wouldn’t you guys feel silly if you interviewed the same user twice under separate aliases? You’re safe, don’t worry.

S’morph is definitely the guy who made me realize that there’s a place for novelty accounts on Reddit though. The idea for GWRF really came about naturally, but Shittymorph essentially showed me how to apply it and execute it by watching how he did it, and within two weeks of me starting the account, he sent me a DM and encouraged me to keep at it. That went a really long way towards motivating me to continue.

Q: So before becoming this infamous Redditor that people now look out for, were you active on the platform in any other way? What was your history with Reddit before, and have you ever tried anything similar to GuyWithRealFacts in the past?

A: My oldest Reddit account is six or so years old, I’ve had more than a few. I spent most of my time on indie game subreddits before GWRF. I’ve dabbled in indie game design and development for years, I’m actually still quite active on that scene, and Reddit was an incredible resource for learning. In my experience, the average Reddit user is a great person and I love being part of the community.

I tried another novelty account simultaneously with GWRF around 2018. I’ve always kept them totally separate. It was inspired by H.P. Lovecraft and the idea was to take a normal post about a normal subject and turn it into a short horror blurb. I found out a couple of things while doing that though. Mainly, I found out that I can’t emulate H.P. Lovecraft with any sort of accuracy at all. It turned into just wordy posts that didn’t contribute much of anything to the thread and definitely didn’t lead to much in the way of fun conversation. The account still exists, but I’m not super active on it anymore. Lovecraft is a favorite author of mine and that account was a fun experiment, but it didn’t amount to much.

Q: You started the account in July 2017, so it’s been just over three years since then. At the time, was the intention for the account always to create these fake facts that end on a humorous bait-and-switch-style punchline, or was there a different concept for it originally?

A: Like I mentioned earlier, it all started during a weekend at my wife’s parents’ house. My wife and I were dealing with some hard times, having just lost our first pregnancy to miscarriage at 12 weeks … we were both in a bit of a sad state day-to-day. After that weekend at her parents, I had stopped posting to GWRF and didn’t really plan to continue it. It turns out, she had been following the account, and when she told me that she had enjoyed the posts I made, I decided to keep at it. I liked that it made her happy.

The account was always about posting fake facts, but it started out quite a bit differently than it is now. The earliest posts on GWRF weren’t the outlandish and ridiculous facts that they are now, they were way too believable and not so light-hearted. The comment chains that came up after my early posts were more or less arguments about why I was wrong, mixed with people who believed what I had written. It was just too “troll” for me to feel good about. I literally started to feel guilty because people would be like, “Wow! I can’t believe I learned this cool thing!” and I even registered GuyWithFakeFacts with full intent to switch to that account instead because I felt bad tricking people. Instead of the account switch, I just started making the facts totally unbelievable by the end.

Q: What was your first “fact” setup like, and how was the response during the first few attempts? Did it pick up traction right away or only after a significant amount of time and effort?

A: The earliest facts were short, simple statements of false information. They weren’t funny or interesting and it takes everything I’ve got not to just delete them out of my history. They’re not what GWRF is about anymore, but hey, we’ve all got our beginnings, right?

Q: So when you’re crafting these paragraphs, how do you maintain the illusion in the beginning to trick people into reading the full text? What’s the key to successful trickery? Do you actually research a bit of truth to rope people in, or is it all in the setup?

A: I use a pretty specific format in 99 percent of my posts, and I think it’s that setup that really makes it work. I try to find a newer post that I think will do well on whatever subreddit it’s on. From there, it’s finding a comment that gives me some room to play with. Folks on Reddit don’t take kindly to something totally off-topic, so I’ve gotta relate to the comment in a meaningful way and then go from there.

My overall goal at all times is to never land directly on the truth. I don’t really do any research other than looking up “where did this breed of dog originate from” or “what year was a war between X and Y countries” so I can choose a setting. I almost always escalate my absurdity through each paragraph. Lately, I try to aim for three paragraphs in a post, but sometimes I get carried away — the first paragraph will always be the hook. Some sort of totally plausible but kind of weird idea that grabs people’s attention with a “Huh, never knew that.” The next paragraph(s) will take it a bit further, it’ll maybe be somewhat questionable but still possible. The last paragraph is the reveal. I’ve had you reading for a bit now, you’ve invested, and suddenly somewhere along the line, you’ve started reading nonsense about fish commandeering a spaceship midway through a NASA experiment to head to Neptune or something.

Q: Since you’ve been writing these for a number of years now, how do you continue to keep them fresh and funny without becoming stale or too easy to spot?

A: I have to take breaks from time to time. A couple of times a year, I’ll just stop posting for a month or more. It’s not that I don’t want to post, but I log into Reddit and scroll through and just can’t get inspired by anything, so I just stop trying and take some time away. Eventually, whatever it is that lets me make this stuff up comes back online and I can do it again. When I’m active, the ideas kind of just come to me, I don’t know where I get it from really. I sort of just start typing that first paragraph out and then these weirder and more absurd ideas keep coming along until it’s totally unbelievable. It’s a fun process for me because I’m just making it up as I go. It’s like my inner 3-year-old who lives in a fantasy world just says, “Stand back, I’ve got this,” and then I do the work of typing it out.

Q: Undoubtedly, you’ve probably encountered some negative reactions from users over the years who maybe didn’t like being duped. How do you deal with those interactions, and do you have any particularly crazy ones you can tell us about?

A: I’ve been pretty lucky in that the huge majority of DMs I get are positive ones. People have reached out and told me that something I wrote got them through a shitty day — that’s always nice to hear because that’s really why this account exists in the first place. It got my wife and me through a whole bunch of shitty days. I’ve had the random nasty messages sent to me, but I think most people who have used social media or played online games to any extent have encountered that, and it’s unfortunately not really out of the ordinary for the internet these days.

I did post a picture of our first baby when he finally came with a little bit of backstory around our struggle to have him, and let’s just say, the nature of some of the comments I received were devastatingly mean. I took the post down within a few hours and decided at that point GWRF would remain fully separate from real life. I don’t really engage with the negativity. I don’t respond to the negative DMs, and I don’t really respond to any comments on my posts either. I’ll absolutely engage with anyone who sends a message and wants to talk privately though!

Q: Given the current popularity of your account, were you sort of surprised by the positive reception it’s had? Why do you think other Redditors enjoy your work, and what’s your overall reaction to the success you’ve had?

A: Yeah … I definitely didn’t expect for the account to become so popular. I’m really grateful that people receive what I do so enthusiastically because I have an unfair amount of fun doing it. I count myself really lucky to be able to have this creative outlet, and I hope to be able to do it for a long time. I’m thankful for what I have in the GWRF account. I think people really enjoy being tricked when literally no harm or embarrassment comes from it. It’s something that happens to you in private as you’re reading silently to yourself and realize that something was really wrong with that last sentence.

I love reading the comment chains that come from my posts. Reddit has some incredibly quick-witted people on it who will take my silly ideas and expand on them in amazing ways. A lot of times someone will comment something and I’ll facepalm and wish I had thought of their idea when I was writing my post.

I also have a ton of fun seeing people say they were tricked or saying that they were reading the comment out loud to a family member before they knew what it actually was. My favorite posts I’ve ever done aren’t my favorite because of what I’ve written, they’re my favorite because of what people came up with as a result of them.

Q: Do any of your real-world friends or family know of the account? What do they make of it, and do you ever trick people in your personal life or on other sites with personal accounts?

A: Only a very few people know that I’m GWRF. My wife, obviously, and a handful of close friends. I don’t really do the whole trickery thing anywhere except on Reddit. My friends get a good laugh — or at least they pretend to get a good laugh — when I share a post with them that went well. My wife still comments every now and again about one of them. I think she keeps up pretty well, but it’s not really a regular topic of conversation, it’s just my weird hobby that makes me giggle at my phone in the living room sometimes. I don’t keep it a secret really for any specific reason, other than I don’t really want to have to explain to people why I do it — most of my family doesn’t even know what Reddit is, and so the work to explain to them that I lie on the internet to millions of people who seem to enjoy it … it seems kind of daunting.

Q: Because of the current war online over fake news, misleading information and flagging untruthful content, what do you think is the biggest difference between your style and something like a person who posts about 5G towers causing coronavirus? What are your thoughts on this recent viral debate overall?

A: “Fake News” was already an unfortunate catchphrase when I started GWRF. It was never about taking a stance against untruthful content or proving that people might take what they read at face value. The internet is a really dangerous thing for the information world. It’s so incredibly easy to create a following around a false idea. A huge majority of Reddit users admit that they don’t even read past the headline on the news subreddits. If you look at news posts on /r/politics or /r/worldnews, the top comments are usually people who have read the article and quoted it into the comment thread, because they’re providing the details that nobody wanted to work for otherwise. People, myself included, are really happy to absorb a quick blurb of information and process that as a complete truth without digging more and that makes it really easy to get a false idea out there.

I think what sets me apart from the harmful fake-information side of the internet is that I hold myself to some rules when I make a post. I will never ever post anything that could be alarming or dangerous. I always assume that the reader won’t finish my entire post and that they’ll scroll away after the semi-believable part because it didn’t interest them or because they saw something else that caught their attention. I don’t want someone to read that the weird behavior the cat is doing in the video is a sign of some serious condition, then not read on into the absurdity, and then that person walks away worrying that their own cat does the same thing or telling a neighbor that their cat has a horrible condition because they only read part of my post. I’m responsible with my lies I guess — if that’s even a thing. My intention is that everyone knows what they’ve read is made up, or, if they miss the punchline, the worst thing they’ll do is spout some weird fake information to a coworker and raise some eyebrows.

Q: Have you ever encountered people accepting your “facts” as truth and spreading them further? What do you do in those situations, and do you ever feel bad or do you simply find it hilarious?

A: I feel bad when I get a DM from someone asking me for a source or for more information who is legitimately interested. I don’t really feel bad when someone DMs or comments to tell me I’m a big dumb idiot who’s wrong about what I posted. In both cases, I usually ask the person to read the remainder of my post and to come back to me if they still have questions. Normally, the first guy sends back a “lol oops!” and I usually don’t hear back from the second guy at all.

Q: What’s your one favorite comment or fact that you’ve done since beginning GuyWithRealFacts, and why is it your personal pick?

A: “Weasel Week” is one of my favorites. The comment section still cracks me up — some people played along and others lamented that they had believed it all. Lots of people played along with the post, and it was just a ton of fun to read at the moment.

“Underground Desert Lakes” was my best comment ever if you look at karma value. This one was fun just because I remember looking at the page and refreshing it every 10 seconds or so and my karma would be 50 to 100 points higher each time.

“Kazlo The Red” was my first gilded comment. I like this one quite a bit also because it’s really when I proved to myself that shifting towards more absurd facts was the way to go. It’s also not my usual format, and it reads more like a little short story. This post probably shaped my account more than any other one has.

Q: All these years later, do you know how many total comments you’re up to now? How long do you plan to keep going with it, or do you think it’s starting to become played out in any way?

A: I’m at right around 320 comments total, and I’ll keep going as long as Reddit will have me. I try not to recycle material, and so far I’ve been able to come up with something unique for every post. I’ll stop when people stop upvoting me I guess, but I hope that doesn’t happen any time soon. I love it when I run into something about GWRF in real-life — like in this ad for a Reddit browser:

Or this article about tattoos:

I pulled up my account on redective.com and there are some cool trends here. /r/aww is my go-to subreddit by a HUGE margin — I have 138 posts there. The next highest is /r/gifs with 58. I’ve been trying to get away from animal-based posts lately, and I’ve been spending a lot of time in /r/interestingasfuck and /r/mildlyinteresting. Cats are my favorite subject apparently, according to word counts. I’ve used the word “cats” the most at 334 times, followed by “dogs” 180 times, and, oh man, “actually” is next at 141. Am I the “actually” guy?! Funny story, I found myself in an article and mentioned it to my wife via text message, and let’s just say she’s great at keeping me grounded:

Q: While your brand of humor may not exactly be a meme in the traditional sense, it shares many similarities to other forms of internet culture that falls into the same category, so are you big into memes at all? What are some of your favorite memes from the past, or any recent ones you’re particularly fond of currently?

A: I love running into a good meme in my browsing, but I honestly don’t think I can say which one is my favorite. I enjoy them in their moment, but I don’t really quote them or use them day-to-day myself. Without fail, by the time I run into a post where I can apply a meme, someone has beaten me to it. I do feel like some of them get overdone. In any Reddit comment that fools someone, you always see “He had us in the first half!” and man, I’m tired of that line, but it’s still posted a billion times a day. I get that comment a lot, and I appreciate the fact that someone took the time to comment on my post, of course, but that one just doesn’t make me laugh anymore. There are others that never die and make me laugh every single time. The “poop knife” joke on Reddit is one of them. I was DYING when I read that story for the first time, and it still finds its way into random subjects from time to time. My favorite memes are the ones that make you feel like you’re part of an inside joke that you slowly get to see other people introduced to.

Q: So before we wrap it up here, what’s a little-known fact about Know Your Meme that you think everyone should know? Can you give our readers some parting knowledge to take with them?

A: All joking aside, because the GWRF schtick is tough to do on command, there’s actually a really cool coincidental fact about Know Your Meme that I bet you haven’t even heard yet!

The KYM domain name was registered on November 25th, 2007, from the West Coast of the U.S. You guys share not only a day, but you also share the location of one of the most evidenced UFO sightings in history. There were reports all over Seattle for around 20 minutes by hundreds of eyewitnesses claiming that something was hovering over the city. There are even tons of cellphone pics online if you want to see them.

I’m a bit of a UFO nerd, so I’ve read about the incident since it’s surrounded by so much evidence. According to multiple customers, the WiFi at two different Starbucks locations crashed during the sighting. After the internet supposedly went down, knowyourmeme.com was registered at the exact same time via an IP address traceable to the public WiFi at one of the stores.

So … Know Your Meme was registered on broken WiFi at a coffee shop with a pretty outer-space-themed name (STAR-Bucks? Come on, hide it a LITTLE bit!). Think about this: aliens come to earth and abduct a few people who happen to be on their phones looking at memes. Aliens study the memes and conclude that they are our preferred language. They register a website to get us to volunteer our info to them. Experts on the subject have theorized that we can probably expect a spaceship to show up any day, full of aliens shouting meme one-liners at us. Thanks to Know Your Meme, we’re probably doomed to a future of occupation by memeing aliens.

Q: Any final word or additional info you want to add?

A: Follow my profile on Reddit! I make posts there too about projects I’m working on at the time for anyone who’s interested — there’s usually something stickied in there that’s a little off-topic from normal GWRF stuff. I keep it pretty low-key because GWRF isn’t about promoting anything, it’s just about sharing in some fun with my pals on Reddit.

(Art by The Critter's Cove)

Brian is the man behind the Reddit account GuyWithRealFacts. You can check out his profile or his subreddit and follow him to see more of his bait-and-switch creations.