Humor on the web and how to stop it
blog.bumblebeelabs.com
blog.bumblebeelabs.com
Despite all the annoying pretense and the persistent damage to my writing style, I suspect this sort of culture might be necessary, or at least not harmful, to what WP is trying to accomplish. Formality is a sign that a group of people needs to get something done despite not necessarily liking each other very much. This has always been ubiquitous in the physical world of geographically assigned coworkers, but quite rare on the Internet.
What gets passed off as 'Internet humor' is not actually funny. It is too stupid to be funny. It is something else. I think this article inadvertently makes this argument. (Some sort of postmodern misappropriation of the idea of humor).
To say that a community or group of people frown upon humor makes me depressed. Humor is a fundamental human coping mechanism. It is how we deal with things that are painful or stressful or otherwise bad.
If the culture here starts claiming that humor is 'frowned upon,' I'm not letting the door hit me in the ass as I leave. Who the fuck wants to be a part of that culture? I'm not a damned robot, I like things that are funny. If it makes me laugh, how will I be frowning?
We've all observed that x website 'went downhill' when people started using 'internet humor'. This isn't the fault of humor in general, heck, it isn't even a causal relationship; it is correlative.
It is just as possible that as the user base expanded, you had a higher quantity of people who could not meaningfully contribute to the debate. One way for these users to interact with everyone else is through stupid memes and lolcatz.
There are plenty of other ways, however, for them to interact with the greater community, and (it seems to me that) these are just as toxic (trolling, flame-baiting, repeating what someone else already said, repeating platitudes or creating various forms of cults of personality and hero worship around the users that actually can contribute meaningfully).
So please, 'frown upon' humor that contributes to a low level of discourse. Burn it to the ground. But don't resort to a slippery slope argument against all humor, and don't turn a blind eye to behaviors that are just as bad.
I don't quite know the answer to this which is partly why the essay remains unfinished. But I do want to note that the upvote/downvote mechanism happens to be especially vulnerable to pathological humorous behaviors. A small, concerted clique of the "wrong element" can radically change the tenor of the site compared to a large and silent majority and, once the shift is made, the trend becomes self-reinforcing.
All it takes is a couple of redditors coming over and unthinkingly upvoting the humorous answers to start a mass movement.
Trolls only have an outsized influence to the extent that the rest of the community has fuzzy or differing ideas about community norms. The larger the community the more likely this becomes. Trolls work by flirting with the boundaries of acceptability.
Crafting a joke that fits all that is probably worth an upvote just on principle.
IRL, due to the kind of conversation that goes on around here, HN would be akin to the floor of the NYSE on a bad day. Lots of shop talk, not much else. It's all rather sad in a way, but it does keep the content of the site focused. We constantly have meta-discussions here as a defense to keep the conversational content high and there seems to be a community consent that humor, in general, is not for HN.
Part of the problem is that what often passes for Internet humor is absurdism. I'm not sure if that's because it's the clearest type of humor you can get across in text while being clear that, "hey, this is humor hint hint" since irony and sarcasm are so easily misconstrued in text, or some other effect. But it seems that once a site allows for acceptance of absurdism as part of the dialogue, the information content of the comments seems to drop quickly to near zero. It just introduces so much noise you have to find signal in, and it makes having a high signal conversation so much harder. I find it sad on many levels that HN is such a fun free place, but I get why it is that way.
I could change tabs over to reddit in a moment and post in a pun thread, or head over to twitter and #stickto140.
So not only are we netizens, but we're also often multi-nationality netizens.
It's an interesting idea where the aspect of national membership is decoupled from identity. I think you're closer to how it actually works though, where people assume different identities depending on their virtual national membership.
Some of the inside jokes I have with some of my friends make reddit memes seem like incisive, original wit by comparison...
The article makes a great case for why humor on the web can be bad for the web. But I was disappointed that it stopped there. It didn't go into how to stop it at all.
Humor is important but only when carefully practiced in the most tasteful way. The humor-user must provide undeniably useful content sprinkled with humor for it to be positive.
The #python IRC channel has a "NO LOL" policy. That channel
is one of the most helpful channels on Freenode.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc?
The title is a riff on Johnathan Zittrain's "The future of the internet & how to stop it" http://futureoftheinternet.org/ and the post was a pretty free-form exploration of the topic written with a tight deadline.
I'm glad people are enjoying it, I honestly didn't know what the reaction would be when I posted it.
Take a look at any play, novel, poem, song, painting, etc. etc., and you’ll find that they’re all filled with in-jokes and references to some shared canon or to recent events. The idea that once you hit the internet this becomes some uniquely exclusionary practice seems pretty historically revisionist.
I would guess that if you looked for instance at the letters received by congressmen or newspapers, you’d find just about the same amount of incomprehensible garbage.
I dispute your claim that there is a substantively different purpose to the use of “humor” in online writing vs. online writing: it doesn’t match my experience. But even if it happens to be true in some sense, your essay doesn’t provide convincing evidence.
* * *
On the other hand, I think your commentary about the internet having a “citizenry” is pretty interesting.
I guess I'm arguing that, given the same person, placed in two contexts, they will produce two different types of humor and the offline version will be objectively funnier than the online version. And the core of the difference between the two is due to the affordances of the space. Is that a bit clearer?
People clearly tell different jokes to different audiences, but I don’t think the distinctions in audience here are inherent in the medium. For example, someone telling a joke in an IRC channel with a bunch of regulars who know each other will tell a different kind of joke than someone writing a Youtube comment. Likewise a guy might tell his poker buddies a different joke than he’d scrawl on the inside of a bathroom stall.
You complain about internet humour being nothing more than remixes of old jokes, pop culture references and done-to-death memes. Yet, you employed a similar technique by basing your title on that of an existing text... for humorous effect?
I saw irony there.
(You even predicted my tongue-in-cheek response. Bravo, sir!)
If you are doing any kind of a social/crowd-sourcing website, you need to understand the topics mentioned in this article, or it will bite you.
Heck, I downvoted it.
Humor on the web and why to stop it (if you run a community site)
Trying to avoid having your social network trolled by 4chan types doesn't really fit my idea of "stopping humor online." Goatse isn't exactly what I think of when you say "humor."
The article misses a key aspect of humor (and its intellectual companion wit): appropriateness. Sites without humor may be appropriate for some purposes, particularly those which strive to provide only factual information -- such as the previously mentioned Wikipedia where humor (and wit) is never deemed appropriate.
From my observation, HN is accepting of humor and wit, but the standard of appropriateness is generally higher than elsewhere on the web. As is the case with Wikipedia the standard is maintained only by a ruthless and constant editorial commitment to community standards.
I believe that for sites where users generate editorial content at least some forms of humor will always be deemed appropriate, e.g. self-deprecating and that which softly defuses contention. For building a diverse community of experts, some level of off topic humor is necessary. Otherwise you only get fanatics.
Although most people don’t want to participate in 4chan, they have an intuitive sense that life with Jorge of Burgos in charge is likely to be worse.
If you're using Firefox, I heartily recommend going Preferences -> Content -> Fonts & Colours -> Advanced, choosing a nice readable set of typefaces (such as the Droid family, if you have them, or Lucida Grande on a Mac), and unticking "Allow pages to choose their own fonts".
"By far the largest majority of humor on the web comprises of memes, catchphrases, remixes and repetition. All your base are belong to us, lolcatz, goatse and the rest."
*As the author of this blog post does not explain how to stop these comedic citizens.
anybody who disagrees with this just wants even more attention.