You might be bumfuck-nowhere-adjacent. But if you have DSL, fiber, or cable, you are not in bumfuck nowhere.

-Sent through my solar powered starlink connection from actual bumfuck nowhere. Where power lines don't even exist.

Good bot.

Maybe the internet has shown us people that were already dumb but we just didn't have a way of knowing they exist?

Has it, though? I grew up in the 80s, and I feel like I simply didn't have a clue how ignorant people were or what batshit things people believed behind closed doors. Even when people disclosed to me their inner narrative, I feel like I just assumed they were joking or using extreme hyperbole.

The internet has made me realize ... they weren't joking. At all. They really believe that shit.

If you look into it, you'll realise the underlying theory quite obviously came to be when someone very smart tried to figure out how could a flat earth work without throwing all physics out of the window. It's actually pretty neat. There are obviously details that can be tested for and the model disproven, but it does account for a lot. IIRC the basis is that the flat Earth is constantly accelerating at 1g, which provides gravity. Per theory of relativity you can accelerate at a constant rate for an arbitrary length of time, so that works. I think stuff such as phases of the Moon etc are also accounted for, though I don't remember the details of that.

Really, people get too caught up in finding holes in the model when the most obvious flaw is that the whole thing requires tens of thousand people at least all knowingly covering this up without getting anything out of it. But if you look at it as a thought experiment, not an attempt to describe the reality, you'll find that it's really pretty cool. Or, it was cool, before idiots started to actually believe it.

The problem is that in a flat plane with any amount of thickness, there will be always more mass diagonally than vertically, and it would still require a curve to evenly distribute the mass. I am by no means an expert on the matter, but from what I can recall, the only geometrical shape that allows for it is either a sphere or some complex hyperbolic curve, which is still not a plane.