What happened to the internet to make it so that you now have to say “I’m not a medical expert, a beauty expert, an underpaid Walmart cashier struggling just to make ends meet just to lose my job to a robot or a piercing expert so take my advice with a grain of salt, but yeah, I think it would be wonderful for you get your ears pierced”?
I’m probably aging myself here, but it’s mildly annoying to see so many words for something that should just be assumed until someone explicitly says “I’m an expert, make sure you clean them regularly or don’t get them at all”.
The earrings are just a random example I thought of just now.
(This is somewhat satire, somewhat curiosity and somewhat ranty lol)
EDIT: Thanks for the insightful history lesson guys! I actually learned a little bit about the internet (at the risk of really honing in on my age lmao). I feel I should clarify, though. The issue I want to address isn’t the use of disclaimers in general, but rather the need for exceptionally long ones like my example above where the disclaimer is like 5x longer than the actual comment, which, btw, thank you all for commenting at least 5x more information than disclaimers lol
People have been throwing that kind of disclaimer on online comments so long that they came up with the abbreviation “IANAL” back in the 80s or 90s, back when the World Wide Web was either not even a thing yet or brand-spanking-new and Usenet was king.
There are, frankly, a whole lot of absolute morons out in the world.
Sometimes those people are the ones asking for advice, sometimes they’re the ones trying to give it.
Some people who will take anything you say at face value, won’t verify any information for themselves, won’t do any research, etc. and if they follow your advice and screw up they sometimes like to lug litigious about it.
And when they’re the ones giving advice, they’ll confidently state stuff that is just flat out not true and sometimes dangerous.
Hopefully you can see at least some of the ways those could be a bad combination.
Personally when I make those kinds of disclaimers, it’s because I’m
Looking out for myself, I don’t want to get sued, I dont want some asshole to harass me or dox me or ruin my reputation or anything because they followed advice I gave because they thought I “sounded like I knew what I was talking about”
I’m looking out for the other person. I’m not a professional and I know it, I’m warning them that they should only take my thoughts or advice for what they’re worth which may not be much, and there’s a real chance the person I’m talking to is an idiot.
I also feel like it kind of invites someone who does actually know better to come in and correct or add on to what I’ve said, and I always welcome that sort of learning opportunity.
And it can sometimes be a way to slip in a little humor if you slip in something like “I’m no octopus psychologist” or something when you’re discussing the behavior of an octopus. (To the best of my knowledge, "octopus psychologist is not a real job, and that’s why it’s humorous, at least to someone with the same kind of dry humor as me)
I’ve wasted 44 years not knowing I could have become an octopus psychologist and now it’s too late, thanks a lot. 🐙
I mean, I agree that we should have them, and your personal reasons for doing so are great ones, especially the invitation part. Also, somehow this is my first time seeing IANAL lol
EDIT: Thanks for the history part, I may have to look a little more into the birth of the internet
Child of the 80s here and grew up with connecting through a university and 28k modems. I never encountered the term IANAL until the last ten years or so. I was mostly on gamer forums though so maybe that’s why? I never saw it on older websites or chat rooms either.
Yeah, it is probably largely dependent on the parts of the internet you inhabit, I can’t see it coming up in gamer forums outside of maybe in-depth discussion of piracy laws, but it’s definitely something I’ve seen around the internet as long as I can remember (my family got online in the mid-lato 90s, I feel like I first encountered it in middle school or early high school so early 2000s-ish.
But by that point it was pretty well-established, it wasn’t hard to google what it meant at that time.