There’s a lot that actually believe the earth is flat. A disturbing amount of people have seriously tried to convince me of it.

And who are these people? And who are you? When did this happen?

I still believe that flat earthers are a group of trolls being paid by some corporation or something to just clutter up online spaces with as much bullshit as possible to make people talking about real conspiracies that are actually happening look like lunatics.

"What? you think there weren't any WMDs in Iraq? Do you think the earth is flat too?"

Fyi, "chem trails", or "cloud seeding", as it's actually called, is very much real. When you search by it's real name, you'll find programs going back to the 60s. California, for example.

MANY conspiracy theories are based on a shred of truth. UFOs are mostly classified craft(the Blackbird was one, once known as the UFO "Aurora").

Flat Earth was just a group that liked to jokingly entertain crazy ideas for shits and giggles that got coopted by people who took the satire seriously.

We'd do ourselves a great service if we stopped seeing every issue in broad strokes and saw the nuance and context behind it. You're no better with your rant broadly denouncing a wide array of topics in mass.

I always assumed it was something like that. A thought experiment that someone who wasn't "in the know," stumbled upon, latched onto, and created an entire subculture.

As I understood it back in the old times…. The Flat Earth Society was a groups of logical rationalist who got together and for shits and giggles (as well as practicing rational debate) would pick an indefensible argument (eg. the earth is flat) and attempt to use rational arguments to support that indefensible claim.

Basically a rowdy drunk philosophers get together.

Edit: there is no proof of this, just something I read online in the early days of the internet.

but snowballed out of control.

I don't think it "snowballed" out of control or whatever. I think that group is full of trolls that don't believe what they say.

Each one of them is a black hole that eats all of your time while you try to debate them.

Sounds like something someone trying to spread round earth propaganda and discredit the true flat earth would say.

The others are either trolls or ignorant people that actually believe the conmen.

I think they're all trolls that are part of some kind of agenda that will ultimately result in something like the ministry of truth from 1984, we almost got exactly that here in the US, they were going to call it "the board of misinformation"

And it turns out, as usual, the official narratives about many things the government and corporations were trying to control was all bullshit. And the people who got removed from social media for various reasons weren't actually wrong about what they talked about.