Suggest HN: No April Fools this year • Hacker News Board

Re: Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

#41

Post by midgetjones » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 9:23 AM UTC

jmkd wrote: post #35

midgetjones wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but in agreement with OP, April Fool jokes just aren't funny. They're inherently mean. You can be funny without tricking someone, and everyone is already on an emotional knifepoint at the moment.

What about easter-egg style April Fools' like Google's 8-bit maps? Not an ounce of meanness https://maps.googleblog.com/2012/03/begin-your-quest-with-go...

Fair enough, good ones can exist. But every year April 1st becomes such a barrage of PR stunts, mostly not of that quality, that I'd rather companies didn't waste the resource.

Re: Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

#42

Post by onion2k » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 9:25 AM UTC

chimprich wrote: post #21

The best April Fools joke I can remember was an anti-joke, when Google announced Gmail on the 1st of April. They were promising what were then unbelievably generous allowances and no one could agree on whether they were serious or not.

For me, a former Perl hacker, the Parrot announcement represents the best April Fool's joke.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100718195724/http://www.perl.c...

The official Perl.com site announced Perl and Python were going to merge so you could run both languages in the same interpreter. In itself that was quite amusing, but the best part is that the Raku project actually adopted the name for their VM because it could actually do that, and became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine, so what started out as a proper joke turned out to be real.

Re: Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

#43

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 9:25 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #12

gherkinnn wrote: post #4

> As a general rule April Fools has become less popular on the web the more widespread it has become Agree. Most are somewhere between tedious and boring. “Oh look, we changed our company name to [something amusing only to a pencil pusher]. Aren’t we funny. Buy our products.” > some people might take levity badly given the current world situation Disagree and fuck them. The last thing we need is doom and gloom [0]. F…

As I said some people would take levity badly, I don't necessarily agree with them, but there are people who often say things are too serious to joke about or during. on edit: submitted before your edit.

Things you shouldn't joke about are one thing. But during? Sure, there are situations that you shouldn't joke during... for a few hours up to maybe a day or two max. During a weeks or months long situation, jokes can't and shouldn't be stopped.

Re: Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

#44

Post by adventured » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 9:26 AM UTC

midgetjones wrote: post #29

jmkd wrote: post #23

I find this a mean-spirited, depressing and (ironically) tone-deaf idea. 1. People need humour in challenging moments 2. Black comedy and gallows humour can lift the spirit at even the worst of times 3. As much of the northern hemisphere enters spring we could collectively do with a fillip to jolt us into a more optimistic mindset The only value in this proposal I see is that if you are working on a tedious April Foo…

I agree with you, but in agreement with OP, April Fool jokes just aren't funny. They're inherently mean. You can be funny without tricking someone, and everyone is already on an emotional knifepoint at the moment.

> I agree with you, but in agreement with OP, April Fool jokes just aren't funny. They're inherently mean.

This entire debate is mostly going to be heavy on the subjective and is largely pointless accordingly. It's opinion tossing, people hoping their opinion somehow magically weighs more.

I like pizza. No, pizza sucks, it's too hot. Pizza isn't hot enough. Only cold pizza is good. No all pizza is inherently evil. Pizza is hand delivered by the saints. Only pizza with pineapple is good. Pizza with pineapple is the worst thing ever.

Seinfeld sucks, he isn't funny at all. Seinfeld is a god.

Re: Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

#45

Post by DanBC » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 9:26 AM UTC

I agree. I think this comment sums up how I feel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289

> I agree with what people have already said, but I think there's one more point to add: people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are. We have a tendency to think, "This idea of mine is hilarious! And different! Surely this witticism is the exception." And we are usually wrong. When you have N people all doing that, there's a lot of noise.

> I try to gently point this out to people who complain when their attempt at humor has been downvoted by the community. It's not that we don't like humor. We just don't like banal attempts at humor, which becomes noise. Or, put in a less charitable fashion, "You're not as funny as you think you are."

Re: Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

#46

Post by bArray » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 9:27 AM UTC

Are we supposed to pause comedy until this virus is over? Potentially we could still be dealing with this till Christmas. Hell, give it another year for people to begin to come to terms with the misery surrounding the virus. When shall we start comedy again?

On the other hand, I want to see even more jokes. Yes, the situation is crap, so even more the need to raise everybody's spirits. If you don't want to see jokes, log off for a day, some insane Doctors said it won't actually kill you.

I would suggest that jokes that lessen the current virus or deaths surrounding it would be in poor taste, but each to their own. I personally won't be making morbid jokes, but I'm not going to fetch the pitch forks out of the garage to go seek revenge from anybody who does.

Re: Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

#47

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 9:27 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #12

gherkinnn wrote: post #4

> As a general rule April Fools has become less popular on the web the more widespread it has become Agree. Most are somewhere between tedious and boring. “Oh look, we changed our company name to [something amusing only to a pencil pusher]. Aren’t we funny. Buy our products.” > some people might take levity badly given the current world situation Disagree and fuck them. The last thing we need is doom and gloom [0]. F…

As I said some people would take levity badly, I don't necessarily agree with them, but there are people who often say things are too serious to joke about or during. on edit: submitted before your edit.

[deleted]

Re: Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

#48

Post by paulgb » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 9:28 AM UTC

kd5bjo wrote: post #40

midgetjones wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but in agreement with OP, April Fool jokes just aren't funny. They're inherently mean. You can be funny without tricking someone, and everyone is already on an emotional knifepoint at the moment.

The traditional april fool’s joke (on the internet) is fundamentally satire, which is notoriously hard to do well. It needs to be something plausible enough to get people to start reading, but be absurd enough that people know it’s not real by the end without being told.

It's especially hard to do well when it's forced through the filter of a PR team. It's not humor for humor's sake, it's humor to improve a brand. I don't think this is impossible to do well, just very rarely done in practice.

Re: Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

#49

Post by mcv » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 9:28 AM UTC

midgetjones wrote: post #29

jmkd wrote: post #23

I find this a mean-spirited, depressing and (ironically) tone-deaf idea. 1. People need humour in challenging moments 2. Black comedy and gallows humour can lift the spirit at even the worst of times 3. As much of the northern hemisphere enters spring we could collectively do with a fillip to jolt us into a more optimistic mindset The only value in this proposal I see is that if you are working on a tedious April Foo…

I agree with you, but in agreement with OP, April Fool jokes just aren't funny. They're inherently mean. You can be funny without tricking someone, and everyone is already on an emotional knifepoint at the moment.

Yeah, we need to get rid of "jokes" that mislead people, mock them, or otherwise hurt or disadvantage people. Especially since fake news and misinformation has become a serious problem online. Jokes that are actually fun are great. But those don't need to be restricted to April Fools either.

Re: Suggest HN: No April Fools this year

#50

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 9:28 AM UTC

Jaruzel wrote: post #37

> Most April Fools pranks are tedious. Totally agree. Also the problem with most April Fools events online is that unless you spend 30 minutes scrutinising the page, it's not apparent that it's a joke or fake. A bad joke is one that no-one gets. It doesn't make you clever to have outwitted your readers, just arrogant. Let's face it, in these trying times, there's enough fools online and in the media trying to screw o…

Most? That's a shame. The ones notable enough for me to remember are all ridiculous fake product launches, where it's really obvious that they're not serious (though sometimes it does exist in some form, which just makes it better).