Threads like this remind me of the day I found out that other camps played “Stairway to Heaven” as their last dance as well. Suddenly nothing looked as special as before – the pine trees weren’t as green, the sunlight on the lake lost some its shimmer…
You don’t need the internet for that. I’m reasonably sure the writers for American Dad have been spying on me. If only they’d slip up enough for me to sue them . . . 
If that’s on your own computer, or you’re logged in to Google, that’ll be because Google knows you visit the Dope. It won’t give the same results to someone who’s never been here.
That said, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if some of the Cracked contributors are on here. It’s a big board and they have quite a few contributors, and there’s a lot of similarities between some of their topics (they do ignorance-fighting ones too) and ours, and the snarky sense of humour would fit well. One big site about knowledge and humour referencing another (where the weighting of those two are different but both are important) is hardly beyond the realms of possibility.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all. We’re not the end all be all of internet discussion but we’re hardly an unknown group. There was an episode of Mythbusters where they showed Grant researching a topic and he was on the Straight Dope website. They may not be active contributors but I’m sure we have our share of famous readers.
There was once an article that talked about people staying conscious after their head was cut off that i think linked to a first hand account on SDMB of someone who was involved in a wreck where their friend suffered such a fate. They could have found it from googling, but, yes, I’m pretty sure they have linked to forum posts.
That was one of Cecil’s articles and that was how I found this site in the first place. I had seen a show on TV about someone who had been executed via guillotine. Prior to the event, the man said that he would try to blink as many times as possible, and (according to the show) he blinked something like 20 times. I thought that was BS and went on the internet to find out more about this supposed event and wound up here.
So it doesn’t surprise me that someone at Cracked researching the exact same thing would end up in the exact same place.
Here is Cecil’s article that Cracked linked to (and quoted from):
Yeah, sorry about that. Sometimes I’m an asshole. I’m trying not to be.
A Dope thread was also mentioned in an AVClub article about XKCD’s “Time” comic.
If I recall correctly, Weird Al Yankovic and Sarah Michelle Gellar have mentioned the board in interviews and said they lurk here.
To get back to the OP, the recent Cracked article references this 2011 article: 6 Innocent-Sounding Topics That Are Guaranteed Flame Wars. Christina H gives examples of posts from various forums on topics like declawing cats and circumcision and whether 0.99999 equals 1 - all topics extensively discussed on this board - but none of the examples she used are from here. This shows that these same arguments occur all over the internet.
What?! No I didn’t!
Oh, shit.