Microsoft bans April's fools pranks | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft bans April's fools pranks

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75 pointsherodotus72 comments

Aprils fools day was really fun and cute for a little while there, maybe around 2006-2008 when it was unexpected and delightful. I don't know why or when it happened, but it's incredibly cringey now. Like watching your parents trying to dab, and instead of laughing at themselves, your parents actually think they're cool and getting respect from kids.

So I didn't know what dabbing was. First google result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN6FsToW2w4

Bet you wished you could get that time back now...

/I know I do.

Agreed. But more like boofing vs. dabbing.

Please define boofing? I'm too old to get it organically.

UrbanDictionary.com is your friend. In this case, you may want to pass on knowing.

Fun fact: googling it gets a nice box-out from Forbes on it, featuring the words "butt chugging".

🆒

I wonder if it’s just a matter of when you come of age online. I’d say the same thing about it once being cute and fun, except 5-10 years earlier.

indeed; the tradition dates to the 16th century.

I want to say for me, it's about how I feel about these companies now, compared to how I felt about them then. Elaborate April Fool's jokes struck me as cute and human and uncorporate, and a lot of the companies who do them no longer feel human and uncorporate to me anymore. So now it just feels disingenuous.

I would also say the quality of the jokes has declined over time.

I agree with this sentiment.

Worthy of mention: Diablo II's Secret Cow Level. Initially a rumour among fans, Blizzard teased players and posted a screenshot of cow monsters on April 1st 1999 [1]. This joke soon became reality in the sequel, Diablo II.

IMO they used an April fool's joke as an excellent device to entice players. I find it to be genuinely humourous (killing herds of cows brandishing weapons), and best of all -- the joke was on us, it turned out to be a real thing in the following game. It is a classic level in Diablo II and one of the best areas to farm.

To this day it is a memorable joke, often recalled by gamers. It had even made its way into Starcraft (cheat code: "there is no cow level") for additional effect.

[1] https://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Secret_Cow_Level

World of Warcraft added a secret cow level a couple years ago for Diablo's 20th anniversary: https://kotaku.com/world-of-warcraft-now-has-a-secret-cow-le...

I still feel like Blizzard maybe does the best April Fool's gags, because they're willing to make fun of their own failings in a way Google or Microsoft brand people would never allow (see the Clippy thing on Teams). Blizzard's April Fool's patch notes often includes commentary about their own company's broken promises or mistakes.

That being said, after this past year, I'm not sure how funny I'll find Blizzard's mistakes.

My god, the cow level. Though I never played my brother did extensively and we both had our computers in the same room. For weeks all I heard was non-stop mooing as he and his friends tackled the cow monsters over battle net. He even spent hours trying to figure out a way back into the cow world after he accidently led most of them to the portal and could not transport back as he was ganked and insta killed. I can still hear them...

This is how I feel about Google Doodles in general.

I feel like at this point they are a psychological tool designed to create an impression of Google...

Slashdot used to (well, when I used to read them) have really excruciatingly lame fake stories in an attempt to be funny on that one day...

The pony theme was great.

This is 100% a function of your age, not a specific date.

I remember NPR trying to do an April Fools prank long ago. It was a dog bark translator. My reaction was "cool, though I already kinda know what my dog barks mean". I wondered how hard the technical problem was.

When I realized it was a prank, I didn't feel duped. I felt like the purveyor of the prank looked foolish in my eyes.

That's when I realized the true meaning of April Fools. They sure are.

> I believe we have more to lose than gain by attempting to be funny

Ouch... Seems like he’s just bitter about his engineers’ senses of humor?

I can name numerous Google pranks that were obviously stupid and legitimately made me chuckle and then move on with my day — their toilet-powered ISP, Rick Rolling YouTube viewers, Google Maps PacMan, even Contoso switching from O365 to Google Apps (there’s a list of dozens more of them on Wikipedia [0]).

Sure, some of them were a bust, like adding a mic drop GIF to outgoing Gmail messages without clear consent. Large corporations shouldn’t be literally pranking their users. But can anyone name a Microsoft joke off the top of your head?

Maybe I’m in the minority on HN, but I say if you’re confident that you employ some funny engineers who can limit themselves to obvious humor, especially if you’re a small company, why not keep this silly 500+ year tradition alive and well? :)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_April_Fools%2...

The Pokémon Go game actually began as a Google Maps April Fools' Day prank:

https://blog.google/products/maps/become-pokemon-master-with...

Probably had some ill thought out marketing idea shut down by reasoned technical debate :-)

> But can anyone name a Microsoft joke off the top of your head?

Bob?

> can limit themselves to obvious humor

I don't want April fools pranks, but if you do insist on it, then an obvious fooling is somewhat oxymoronic and misunderstanding the point of it. If it's obvious then nobody will be fooled.

I actually agree. I don’t want to be pranked/fooled by companies I rely on — in my opinion, companies who don’t understand that are the only ones who fall flat on their faces on April 1st and need to apologize for a PR disaster on April 2nd [0][1][2][3][4][5][and on and on...].

Big brands who want to participate should really think of it as April Dumb Tangential Jokes Day, perhaps!

[0] https://blog.google/products/gmail/introducing-gmail-mic-dro...

[1] https://lineageos.org/An-April-Apology/

[2] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-04-02-ea-apologises-f...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-01/elon-musk...

[4] http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/taco_liberty_bell

[5] http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarettwieselman/happy-endings-reboot...

Right, and then continuing the thought who wants a 'dumb' joke? That's no fun is it. So let's forget the whole thing.

I think we’re on the same page. Maybe it boils down to the need for jokes that can be easily ignored by people who want April 1st of next week to be an ordinary Monday. In that sense, I’m all for banishing corporate pranks that aren’t 100% non-obtrusive.

> But can anyone name a Microsoft joke off the top of your head?

Clippy

> But can anyone name a Microsoft joke off the top of your head?

The "DOS for phones" announcement was fun, partially because it was an actual app. https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/1/8324661/microsoft-ms-dos-a...

> Everyone hates April Fools’ Day

No they don't, they just hate harmful pranks.

There have been some splendid April Fools. How about the BBC Spaghetti harvest from 1957, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU

> No they don't, they just hate harmful pranks.

couple years ago we reached peak april fools day. every single corporate went "hello fellows kid" and the social pushback was real.

so yes there's still some lingering sense of "genuine april fools are fine but keep your forced advertisement away"

> No they don't, they just hate harmful pranks.

If that were the case, why don’t we have several of these prank days per year? Maybe monthly?

It’s because on a scale of 0-10 these pranks usually rate somewhere between 0 to 2 in terms of humor and > 2 in terms of annoyance.

“Your mailbox is empty!”

What?!

“Haha, no, April Fools!”

I’m rolling on the floor now. Oh. So. Funny.

> If that were the case, why don’t we have several of these prank days per year? Maybe monthly?

If New Year's is so great, why don't we celebrate it twice a year? If Christmas is so good, why doesn't Santa bring gifts every month?

> It’s because on a scale of 0-10 these pranks usually rate somewhere between 0 to 2 in terms of humor and > 2 in terms of annoyance.

For your example, yes But a lot of the "pranks" aren't really pranks per se but more of just having fun and expressing creativity If you look at what Google does each year, they've always had fun and creative ideas, that don't fool or annoy anyone and are enjoyable (with a few exceptions)

Agreed, harmless pranks are what April Fools' is about. On my part I'm planning to prank my relatives on Plex with a fake Game of Thrones season 8 episode, with the intro followed by an hour of Rickrolling.

thinkgeek is the only site that I look forward to on April 1st.

Good. I loathe April Fools jokes online and whenever somewhere suggests them at Cloudflare they get shot down quickly. They are the awful, sophomoric, in jokes that make some small in crowd laugh and just make companies look like idiots.

Agreed.

I hate the web on April 1st.

This thread has really brought some sticks in the mud. Why are you all against others having fun even if you personally don’t get it?

Your fun shouldn’t require bothering other people who don’t want to be involved. I think that’s the issue.

Agreed. I am reminded of this April Fools "Prank":

https://lineageos.org/An-April-Apology/

LineageOS added an irremovable notification saying "your software is not genuine" to Android for April fools. However, they have weekly updates, and I got this notification before April 1st. The only way to remove it was, as root, flip a setting. Needless to say, I and a lot of other users, were pissed.

When the April Fools prank is harmless, obvious, and doesn't affect users, it isn't a big deal. In the above example, has the notification had a dismiss button saying "April Fools", I would have not cared, and probably have been amused. But when your April Fool's "prank" affects other people, then it isn't so funny.

It's not just April Fool's, either. Antd got into a bit of hot water late last year because it was discovered that they included a Christmas theme that got automatically enabled on Christmas and didn't tell anyone about it.

https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design/issues/13098

Two things stick out in my mind. The first one is when my Aunt's Android tablet got all of its photos infected with David Hasselhoff. She didn't realize that the pictures were duplicated (so the originals were still there), so she was extremely upset that all the pictures of her late husband were photobombed with "The Hoff" (she's in her 80's, and doesn't even know what a photobomb is).

The second incident is the Google "Drop Mic" email reply button, that got accidently clicked on and caused some number of people to lose prospective business opportunities.

Now, the april fools jokes that aren't harmful are things like google maps having a pacman mode available, or when Slashdot did their "OMG Ponies" theme.

Thank you for mentioning David Hasselhoff. Until you did I didn't realize it was an April fools prank but instead thought it was a clever Google Easter Egg. My only photo with The Hoff is also one with the Queen Helen Mint Julep Mask which became a reddit mini-meme on its own. I figured some Google programmer was actually looking for people in green faces and didn't make the connection to 4/1. Thanks for clearing it up.

Didn't you know? The internet is srs buziness.

Because people arent as funny as they think they are.

At scale, anticipating the interactions your code is going to have with the rest of the world is very difficult. See, for instance, https://www.computerworld.com/article/2517969/google-s-pac-m... . It's hard enough for normal code, but April Fools tends to exercise some very undertested pathways in both code and organizations, and the results are often unamusing, and potentially serious.

Google and Microsoft and such are the behemoths of the computing industry, and the metaphor works fairly well this time; imagine a giant trying to figure out how to "prank" all the Lilliputians around them. It's gonna end up with squashed Lilliputians, no matter how careful you are.

Leave it to smaller entities.

(Although I do want to say I'm speaking about "pranks" here, like hacking Gmail, or changing the Google homepage too much. Putting up a fresh new website with something fun and cool, something that you have to choose to go to, is fine. But that's not really an "April Fool's prank" anymore, just some new fun and cool site.)

Thinking something is not funny isn’t the same as not “getting it.”

It's because the crowd here is very old. I think the average age is in the 40s or 50s. It's essentially CNN's demographic and a significant number of journalists and media people here. There really is nothing "Hacker" about hackernews. It's pretty much "news". How often do you see the irreverance, humor or anti-authoritarianism of hackers here?

  Everyone hates April Fools’ Day

Err, no?

What kind of corporate HR propaganda speak is this?

Do they mean some/many people hate the pranks, but especially the bean-counters?

Honest question: In trying to avoid unwanted news cycles by banning April Fool's jokes, did they just create an unwanted news cycle?

We did April Fool's jokes at my previous company, and we had to implement code/data changes in order to do so. We never got the time to implement the jokes correctly so it introduced technical debt. Then we never got the time to remove said jokes, so they just remained in the system. Repeat for a few years. The jokes stopped being funny after a few debug cycles and just reminded us of our work situation (which wasn't great).

At least two things sadder than not celebrating April Fool's day are having a sad April Fool's day and having every day be April Fool's day.

Maybe silly hats in the office would be better. Don't tamper with prod.

If you couldn't back out a feature change at will, and never fix technical debt, then you have far bigger problems.

We did have far bigger problems :-)

The April Fool's joke just added a cherry on top of a shit sundae. I could have lived without it. I haven't worked at a company yet that implements April Fool's jokes correctly (defined as noticeable improvement to sales/marketing KPIs, which I think is what they would be going for), so YMMV.

Agreed, this tradition needs to die a quick and quiet death. I actively avoid the internet on April 1st because of it.

The problem is that the April Fools "sense of humor" is mostly of the "amateur thinks they are funny" quality. The pranks are mostly tech geek inside jokes that look embarrassing to anyone outside that social bubble. I admit I'm inside the same geek bubble but at least notice the outside reactions. Ask yourself who cares about the clippy resurrection referenced in the article?

How does one day of willful misinformation work in a medium used as indefinitely persistent storage of human knowledge?

It seems lots of companies feel compelled to make a very lousy effort around this time to be funny in a way that just isn't. Basically the marketing people seem to panic around the end of March to desperately try to come up with something and then mess up by being completely obvious in a desperate attempt to go 'viral' when world + dog is doing the same.

IMHO there's some great potential for the UK to do some brexit related jokes though ;-). Would be awesome if they announced the whole thing was just an elaborate April first joke.

The greatest April fool prank of all time was the release of GMail. I remember seeing it and being blown away by how much was on offer, then I saw the date, had a slight chuckle, and carried on with my day. I was incredibly shook when it still existed the next day, and the day after that. It wasn't long until I was scouring forums trying to get an invite code.

Before, during and the week after April fools I do not read the news at all because I just assume it is all garbage. Just my two cents.

NO FUN

"data tells us that trying to be funny on this day can have limited positive impact and can even cause unwanted news cycles"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

edit:

no, but seriously, humor has significant psychological effects. it's overlooked because of the "business first" attitude (tradition) but actually being able to have fun is highly motivating; i'm alone here, at the bottom of this thread, for wanting to live in a full color world, instead of a film noir.

https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/humr.2009.22.issue-4/humr.2...

Was gonna post this as well, it's by no means an exaggeration.

I would rather that every single year, Google did the same prank: I open my email and it says, "Oops, we lost all of your emails. Sorry!" And three seconds later it says, "SIIIIKE!!!" (And then my emails show up.) And this only happens once, the first time I open a web inbox on April 1st.

As immature of a prank that is, I would rather that happen year after year on every gmail account than see another stupid fake product idea. And I'm sure it would still make other people angry.

Hell, they probably had this idea over at Google and even formed a few meetings about it.

If they fool people, it has a negative impact on the business. If they don't fool people, it was a waste of time and resources... which has a negative impact on the business.

We live in a world with timezones, so that people end up hitting the pranks early or late.

If you want to boost morale, engineer pranks for employees. You get 100% of the "benefits," and 0% of the customer being either fooled or not.

Sounds like a real joy to work at Microsoft. Just when my opinions of the company were starting to change, too.

> “data tells us these stunts have limited positive impact and can actually result in unwanted news cycles.”

The jokes are fun for employees and can be enjoyable to outsiders as well. By banning them outright you've sent a message to prospective engineers about your corporate culture.

Too corporate.

> The jokes are fun for employees and can be enjoyable to outsiders as well.

99% are just weak, lame and embarrassing. I don’t find them fun on either side.

Kind of like how one of the coworker groups I used to work with had a standing "no limericks" rule, as 90% of the time the limerick would potentially be an HR violation.

And what do lame jokes broadcast about the corporate culture? That it's just a bunch of nerds not creative enough to come up with pranks or stunts that are believable up to the reveal where the readers hopefully slap their foreheads in a "I can't believe I fell for that!".

Couldn't help but think that this news was/is part of some April Fools' Day setup.

If I was a another big company my 1 April would now be "Following Microsoft we are also banning..."

If companies could keep their bullshit pranks in-house on April Fools that'd be great, yeah. Have fun with your coworkers and friends but don't infect everyone else with your unfunny crap.

I'm falling in love with MS. I hated them from the moment I know them, because of windoze, and IE, and monopoly and all the other things. But now it doesn't matter.

Now, they need to actually do a an April fools joke! We have replaced bing.com with clippy.com, its more handy

Is there any possibilities that this is their attempt to make early April's fools pranks?

I agree, being funny on Monday usually has a limited positive impact.

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