So you know how that hot girl sent you the pics and even fapped on cam with you ?
It's all lies. .. "She" is actually a man in his mid-40s, balding and has a mushrooms in his feet. And you know that other guy who is your super-best-friend-4evar and whom you tell all your secrets? He's realy a dolphin connected to a computer via neural implants, waiting for either painless death or escape...
Let's be honest, people lie. IRC is no exception... Well, yes, it is an exception. People lie a lot on IRC, the lack of any type of interaction aside from reading ASCII on your terminal means that you don't even have a disembodied voice to identify the other person. I'm sure we have all had experiences of users whose stories seem a little... Unlikely. It is to be expected that people online simply lie from time to time, either because they'd rather not share a particular experience and decided to make up a new one, or simply because they wanted the lulz. Haven't you ever "exagerated" when telling a story? In any case, you best take everything said to you on IRC with a pinch of salt.
Nothing is ever what it seems. In fact, this very page is full of lies and misinformation, the human-basrd nature of internet means that for every true statement, there are two other equally valid trollings.
knowledge = information / trollin
Since we know trolling to be a non-zero value. Also interesting to take into account is that there is much information which is subjective, for ex, dream journals.
So we have to take into account that the more viewpoints cover a single factual data, i.e. stories about Matt are all one sided, since we only know what he says. It all might be a well crafted trolling.
On the other hand, for some reason, people have a tendency to be more plain and transparent over the internet. For ex, furries do want to have sex while wearing a costume, and they're more likely to say they don't if asked IRL