Relevantly lazy xkcd: http://xkcd.com/528/
Well, the same can be said for 90% of what passes for situation comedy. Hardly appropriate to pinpoint this to an app company.
P.S Also, the originality of the joke is not in using Nickelback, but in having a "ban this one artist" button in the first place. The artist being Nickelback is secondary, it could be Bieber or Cyrus etc.
That said, it was important, for the mechanics of the joke, that the artist was someone important and almost universaly despised, else it would be lost in the majority of users (where's the fun in "don't play King Crimson"?).
Have you ever seen somebody appear offended by "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "So how about that airline food?" "'Knock knock.', 'Who's there?', 'Banana.'" "Can I has cheeseburger?"
Those are all lazy jokes. As lazy is as is possible. Yet their laziness lacks the power to offend. No sane person is going to become offended by somebody dredging up some lame 10 year old joke about cats that like to eat cheeseburgers. Wherever you find an example of a "joke that is so lazy, it is offensively lazy", there is without fail a more plausible explanation for the offense the joke elicits.
For example, "Australians are upside-down". Lazy, and makes many people upset. Are they upset because it is lazy? No, they are upset because it is picking on other people (themselves or others).
Exactly. It's a little known fact, but given Earth's exact orientation in space coordinates, it's actually Hungary who is upside-down.
As an Australian, I don't mind it. Reddit bots which make jokes about it on every comment with the word "Australia" in it ... that's annoying (because bots wear out their welcome pretty fast). But most people like to be joked about.
The only lazy jokes which actually hurt are those which are rubbing salt in a wound.
If there is some element of rubbing salt in the wound, then the joke can cross into the territory of "offensive", but that can happen with novel jokes as well. Repeating an offensive joke can make it more offensive, since it contributes to an overall atmosphere, but the repetition itself is not what is offensive.
Australia being upside-down might not be the best example of a joke that crosses into offensive territory.
Are you saying there is no joke so bland, overused, and by the books that it would make people groan and say "that joke is so bad I feel offended you would think I would find that funny"
People don't dislike fart jokes because they're offended by farts. They dislike fart jokes because they're usually bad.
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. A joke cannot become so lazy that it actually offends people with how lazy it is. In the most extreme case realistically imaginable, a series of sufficiently lazy jokes may anger people if they shelled out a lot of money on tickets to hear jokes, but even then they would not be offended unless there is something besides just lazy jokes at play.
Disliking fart jokes and being offended by fart jokes are two different things. If you are actually offended by fart jokes, chances are it has something to do with the scatological nature of fart jokes and your puritanical mentality towards such things. If you merely dislike fart jokes, chances are it is because you are not twelve.
Yes. I would think the joke is dumb. I can't see how you would be offended by it.
People don't dislike fart jokes because they're offended by farts. They dislike fart jokes because they're usually bad.
Interesting, because I would say the exact opposite. I don't like fart jokes because I don't like to think about farts.
And I agree that this Nickelback joke is annoyingly lazy. Not funny enough for the inconvenience it apparently causes some users.
"Offensively lazy" annoys me because I don't think it is tongue-and-cheek much of the time. I think it is a phrase that gets brought into the fray when a joke really was offensive to some people. I never hear it in response to "rated PG" jokes; people who say it probably are offended, but it seems they have misidentified the source of their feeling of offense.
However, what made me a bit upset was the last line in the second-to-last paragraph: "... while still being ourselves." Is hating Nickelback really you/your team? So much that you exclude that particular music artist, and not anybody else?
Of course, the 'feature' is a silly easter egg, and no one needs to call each other names over it. Still, stuff like this makes your app seem incredibly childish (not just unprofessional). If it was a clever insertion of your team's opinions, then including something unprofessional is fine. A teenage-old joke however is not remotely clever or funny.
Disclaimer: I actually enjoy a few of Nickelback's songs.
I don't take what they are doing as an objective statement about taste, but rather as their own subjective statement, which you can't really avoid doing once you're designing stuff for folks.
The "c...j...k" word causes comments on HN to auto-[dead].
@scarecrowbob: Your comment (the one that is a sibling to this comment) is also [dead]. I have no idea why, this is getting kind of absurd...
One of the tweets from the article used the term. Baddox quoted that term. If you turn on "show dead" you can see baddox's comment.
Maybe they should have it off by default if so many people really can't take a little joke...
Even if you're a Nickelback fan, it's a little weird to not get the point of a joke setting (which you can also turn off).
It's not like it was any Nickelback's fan first experience with mockery for what he listens to (or as if he doesn't deserve it).
A world where you cannot mock anybody because everyone is gonna be a cry-baby about it, would be a sad world indeed.
When you make this a public app, people who are fans of Nickbleback will be upset. It is unprofessional to me in the sense that you don't honor your customers' preference. Imagine Apple releases iTune with that feature, and decided that a bunch of artists are not played by default because it was fun to do that by being themselves, how would the public react? If this were just an app made with a friend, fine, maybe it was never unprofessional to the company behind it, but definitely not professional to the consumers, from the consumer's point of view. It wasn't a video app that restricts 18+ videos off by default.
And also a bit harsh to pick a particular band. I can be happier if this were just an April Fool joke and the team had made a prior agreement with the band that this was only for April Fool.
If you actually think Nickelback fans' complains are somewhat important for you to write a blog post, then you are definitely thinking about why it shouldn't be done in the first place.
But there are other subcultures you can join, where being a member of them doesn't make you better. It makes you worse. And "accept that you're doing something bad and you should feel bad" is basically a checkbox on the EULA for joining the subculture. (Most sexual kinks/fetishes are like this, for example.)
The authors were surprised to find people who thought of Nickelback as more like a religion than a kink. Probably because anyone they knew who liked Nickelback, did it in the kink-like way.
That makes no sense to me.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what was said here.