tbh the rat balls article confirms a lot of what i worry about these days which is that no one is actually reading anything. people are just mashing “ok” on things and don’t actually care. there’s no actual quality control because to turn things down for their quality means turning down money for a submission
a couple years ago I found a guy who had constructed an elaborate alternate universe for his fetish in which American women had the largest breasts in the world and all other women on earth desperately hated American women for their huge boobs and wore padded bras to be more like them and all men on earth agreed American women were superior and more beautiful than any others. he had written at least one “scientific” PDF with carefully constructed fake graphs and photos and 3d models “proving” that American women had the largest breasts in the world (this isn’t true IRL btw if that wasn’t clear) and then made a fake website for the fake university that published the paper with fake profiles of the fake researchers who did the fake research. he retouched historical photographs of American celebrities to make their boobs bigger, as “evidence”. there were a half dozen fraudulent websites involved and I think two or more papers. he also created fake user profiles on Reddit etc to spread around his “data”, including of course blond American milfs wearing American flag clothing, who would post about how American women have the largest breasts in the world and then link to his website and papers as “citations”.
well, in probing the socket on this one I found out his papers and websites had been cited not only by actual journalists but also other scientific papers, the authors of which apparently didn’t actually read any of them but had inadvertantly hard coded him into the scientific literature by citing their own, legitimate research with fraudulent fetish worldbuilding by an insane divorced Finnish man who was at one time the Veterinary General of Finland.
I blew this up in a huge thread on Twitter and he must have checked his referral logs (because of course he would) because he tried to send me an international cease and desist and deleted a bunch of his websites in a panic.
my team emailed some of the people who “cited” his work and didn’t hear back. so no, nobody is reading shit and no one cares about anything lmfao