And plenty of people on HN (and elsewhere) swallowed the bait hook, line, and sinker. If you look at the thread on HN from yesterday you'll see plenty of people buying the story unquestionably (though fortunately there were a decent number of people expressing doubt). The problem is that stories like these gain traction and reinforce false narratives about the nature of racial discrimination and other issues.
A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on.
Trolling on Twitter is most effective when there's some truth behind it.
The "names impact hiring" thing is pretty well established, factually, so it's not surprising that folks would believe a tweet thread that seems to align with established fact.
Ultimately, it's normal to believe what people tell you when there's no obvious reason for doubt. If my coworker says they're late because they got stuck behind an accident, I'm not gonna demand photos and a police report. So to people who haven't acquired a high degree Internet literacy, saying "don't believe what you read" sounds like some kind of trick.
I remember a passionate argument I had about some unsourced story of poor Stripe customer support. The other guy was genuinely baffled why I would question the poor merchant who was being so cruelly mistreated.
The interesting thing about this story is that the details are so unlikely that there are "obvious reasons for doubt"; from a 17% mostly negative reply rate to a 87% mostly positive reply reply rate on name only is a huge difference and very unsubtle.
I think it should be obvious that this person never actually ran the experiment, and merely reported what they expected the difference to be.
"It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it could have been true" is a particular kind of reasoning I've seen a few times over the years, from different ideological perspectives.
