Humor on the web and how to stop it

http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-1-humor-on-the-web-how-to-stop-it/

by shalmanese • 16 years ago

74 46 16 years ago

blog.bumblebeelabs.com

wtracy• 16 years ago

The title isn't very descriptive of what's actually in the article, but the article itself is a very good insight to the 4chan mentality.

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.

twinwing• 16 years ago

om nom nom nom

tdoggette• 16 years ago

This is actually a great example of how to discourage stupid humor on a (mostly) serious website.

Heck, I downvoted it.

thristian2• 16 years ago

4chan, nuthin'. I remember having a blast on Usenet back in the day, and the very same styles of humour were prevalent.

param• 16 years ago

When I read the title I thought 'Why the hell would I want to know how to stop humor online.' The article is interesting and would be better served by a title like:

Humor on the web and why to stop it (if you run a community site)

Natsu• 16 years ago

Agreed. For a moment, I expected the piece to be some kind of satire.

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."

AndyKelley• 16 years ago

The #python IRC channel has a "NO LOL" policy. That channel is one of the most helpful channels on Freenode.

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.

DTrejo• 16 years ago

I think #startups might do well to adopt this policy, at least a bit.

rimantas2• 16 years ago

  The #python IRC channel has a "NO LOL" policy. That channel
  is one of the most helpful channels on Freenode.

Does it proof anything?

rimantas2• 16 years ago

No, honestly. I want to know whether you can turn any IRC channel to very helpful simply by having "NO LOL" policy, or does it work the opposite way: by allowing LOLs your channel will become less helpful…

Post hoc ergo propter hoc?

Volscio4• 16 years ago

My IRC channel had a no LOL policy too but now it's being used again...but only in a sarcastical, ironical way.

TeHCrAzY2• 16 years ago

Are there any design/font people that can tell me why the font in the article is so hard to read?

thristian2• 16 years ago

It looks like the CSS is selecting some variant of Palatino. A classic of the genre, it's a very well-respected typeface for books, articles and other long-form written works. However, like many typefaces designed for print work, it doesn't take kindly to on-screen display. Exactly how readable it is depends on which version of Palatino you have, your OS and font-rendering configuration.

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".

lambda• 16 years ago

It looks fine to me. What browser/OS combination are you using?

TeHCrAzY2• 16 years ago

win server 2k8 (r1) + Chrome.

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

I am the author of the piece and I agree the title is poor but the title came before the piece did so apologies that it did not go where I promised.

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.

jacobolus4• 16 years ago

A response: http://xkcd.com/794/

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.

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

This is one thing I neglected to address in my piece due to lack of space. It's not a difference of kind but of magnitude. Offline humor also serves many of the same operational purposes that online does but they are not solely comprised of them.

stuhacking• 16 years ago

That's funny.

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!)

jsharpe• 16 years ago

Wait, did he seriously just use goatse as an example of internet humor?

"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."

Splines• 16 years ago

I've seen far too many image threads of real-world objects staged/photographed to mimic goatse. I wonder how many kids are going to see these (unaware of the origin) and come to the conclusion that the concept of two hands and a circle are somehow hilarious.

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

"All your base are belong to us" predates the internet.

elblanco4• 16 years ago

It comes down to culture. HN for example, generally frowns upon humor unless it really is providing some kind of insight into the discussion -- I've called this place the least funny site on the Web and I still mean it.

ohyes• 16 years ago

I disagree. HN is humor neutral and stupid hostile.

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.

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

The problem is how do you craft a set of effective community norms that allow for one type of humor and not the other? What are the design primitives that support this enforcement?

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.

elblanco4• 16 years ago

I wish comments on HN were sentiment scored for "humor" so I could go back and search for humor-as-comments (or at least attempts) as example. Almost nothing gets downvoted on HN faster than an attempt at humor. There are exceptions, but the joke has to be particularly good to not get a -4.

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.

Volscio4• 16 years ago

The danger with the lack of sense of humor on HN is that it makes it all the more apparent when people shoot down others' ideas here, or give non-constructive advice, or willingly criticize play/experimentation/fun.

edkennedy• 16 years ago

As a citizen of the internet, I do want to point out that the perception of humour varies in what he ironically refers to as meatspace. To some people, "that's what she said" really does sum up their entire sense of humour. The internet, like the world, has a lot of different types of humour. If you don't like it, eat an onion*

*As the author of this blog post does not explain how to stop these comedic citizens.

frou_dh• 16 years ago

That's a good observation: that humour online is mainly about showing off rather than bonding, like offline.

Volscio4• 16 years ago

I don't think it's showing off. No one is excluded from adding to the joke or building on a meme, so long as it's funny. In that way, it's more meritocratic. Yes, you have to learn what the joke is about, and it creates its own culture and language and community, but that doesn't make it exclusionary just because it's not common knowledge. Exclusionary would be saying, "YOU can't say that because YOU are new here."

darkhorse• 16 years ago

i'd argue that almost everything done online (posting to twitter, writing a blog, and yes posting comments here, updating facebook) is done primarily to show off, garner attention, feel important, show people how gosh darn smart you are, etc.

anybody who disagrees with this just wants even more attention.

Volscio4• 16 years ago

I think that says more about your perception of the world than online users' perceptions of the world.

moron4hire• 16 years ago

I've been a member on one particular site for the last 10 years. Our inside-jokes help us create continuity in our community, a continuity that has helped maintain a certain level of maturity and professionalism that isn't well matched anywhere else. Yes, an inside joke is a signalling by the user that they are part of the "in crowd". That is exactly the point. The only way the user can be considered part of the "in crowd" is if they have participated to the point to be generally recognized by others as such. Proper execution of institutional jokes not only signal to other non-members that you are a member, but to members that you are worthy of being a member.

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

If you're comfortable revealing the name of the site, I could give a more insightful comment but yes, humor becoming operationalized also means it can be operationalized for good.

user24• 16 years ago

What's also interesting, beyond the idea that we're internet citizens (and not just American, btw), is that we switch between cultures. A lot of people on HN are also active on reddit, and were on digg before that. And while it's true that you drift between your favourite communities, you also change your attitude dependent on which one you happen to be visiting.

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.

elblanco4• 16 years ago

It reminds me that it's an echo of the old cyber-punk concept of corporate countries. In Snow Crash, "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong" and "Narcolumbia" represents franchised corporate/country soil entities one can slip into and out of as needed, and might be interspersed throughout a geographic region like McDonald's and Burger King.

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.

notahacker• 16 years ago

We make similar "cultural" switches when associating with different groups of people in real life. The conversations I have with family, diffrent groups of friends, coworkers and clients will have completely different tones and references, even if the context is the same (eg bumping into them in a supermarket)

Some of the inside jokes I have with some of my friends make reddit memes seem like incisive, original wit by comparison...

goodside• 16 years ago

Wikipedia is an interesting case study in that not only has it not been overrun by joke memes, but it has virtually eliminated humor from both its public-facing articles and its internal communication. I spent several years as a fairly active member of the community -- never an admin, but enough to get frequent unsolicited requests to voice in on edit disputes. During that time, every word I typed was in that awkward mock-professional tone civil servants use, masked only slightly by saccharine PR-speak when talking to noobs. Jokes were a dead giveaway you were an outsider, and there's nothing more important in the world of WP than sounding like you know what you're doing.

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.

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

This is interesting. Thanks for the info.

brudgers• 16 years ago

As the author notes, one aspect of humor is that it can tend to be off topic, ie about being funny rather than the content of the thread. But, he is mistaken about absurdity; absurdity has a logical form and is commonly employed in discussion. The difficulty is that absurdity easily slides into sarcasm because it can't be wrapped in rainbows and delivered by unicorns.

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.

Humor on the web and how to stop it

Related Stories