Hacker News Reader

Comment by moltensodium | Hacker News Reader

Can I just rant for 5 minutes about how the majority of the time when I pull up social media and open a trending topic or what have you, 90% of the posts are just people trying to come up with the perfect reaction gif and zinger. I often just close the page without ever knowing what happened, but just seeing the same five images trying to be forced into the same melodramatic reaction joke over and over.

No I really don't need to see the universe mind exploding guy in response to a story about some minor medical survey again. It's been done, thanks.

View on HN

It doesn't bother me as much on social media, as it does on tech articles where other developers are the primary target audience. When I'm at work, I really don't need to see a reaction GIF every 5 paragraphs. Not only does it add nothing to the article, it also makes me uncomfortable, as people might be passing by and see this on my screen. It makes me look unprofessional, and to be honest, it makes the author look unprofessional.

On ocasions it might be an ice breaker. I have started to use a few scenes from movies (not quite reaction gifs) as boundaries on some presentations to make the audience laugh (a bit of relief from very technical topics) and also add a clear boundary where I can ask them "did you all get that? let's move on to another topic then".

In a presentation, sure, you can catch the attention of the audience. But in online articles, I would refrain from using it.

Youtube comments are the worst for written memes. The smaller or more niche the channel, the less it seems to occur. It's always a breath of fresh air to see informational/interesting comments on the smaller channels (and to have responsive Youtubers). I don't really use FB much so I don't know if it's equally as bad these days, in terms of memes as comments.

Regarding the Show HN, personally I'd like such a repo for WhatsApp conversations, but nothing work-related for the reasons others have mentioned.

I wonder what percentage of YouTube comments contain a quote from the video.

That's true if subreddits too. The smaller the niche, the more the contributors care it seems.

With regards to small youtubers, you can occasionally have an actually Q/A in comments.

> No I really don't need to see the universe mind exploding guy in response to a story

Universe mind exploding guy haha...what you need to see is some Tim and Eric ;) https://youtu.be/FYJ1dbyDcrI

Unfortunately it's not just social media. I've seen this creep into programming tutorial articles, including ones that are otherwise high-quality. Time to install a browser add-on to filter this noise out?

Could probably train a neural network to detect memes

You guys must be fun at parties. Emojis = hieroglyphs, gifs = animated hieroglyphs. A lot of meaning is embedded without using words.

Maybe I’m harsh, but I’d say a lot of the point is signaling that one is fashionable, in a sense. Meme styles and popularity changes so fast, it’s like a niche sport keeping up with it.

That is, it’s much less about concisely (or arguably lazily) communicating meaning and more about scoring internet points.

You're not harsh, you just read as the typical post on https://reddit.com/r/iamverysmart

Reply on news.ycombinator.com