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The crushing lameness of April Fools Day on the Internet.

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: The crushing lameness of April Fools Day on the Internet.

#31

Post by cessor »

I totally agree with you. April 1st renders my local, personal experience of the internet completely useless. This goes on almost for a week, because people will repost the clever 'jokes' for a couple of days. April fools day on the internet is, as it feels to me, a Marketing Department Slack-Off Day. Every company feels they have to contribute, because the others are doing it.

Some tech sites will do the same with ridiculous stuff. 04/1/14: Python 2.8 to lose the GIL. HAHAHAHAHAHA DO YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?! It doesn't even make sense.

I would like to point out that this issue extends to other, especially North American happenings. As soon as Haloween, the super bowl or "the Oscars" are up, the internet becomes almost unusable because all the sites with user-"shared" (let's be honest, it is rarely really generated by them) content have no other topics and half of the news sites appear to have nothing better to do then to comment on the obvious real life events; even worse, the European news sites will start commenting on the American stuff as well. It is times like this when I get out old 90's PC Single Player games just to be away from people for a while.

I have the dumbest sense of humor and will laugh about almost anything but April 1st is just gear-grindingly annoying...

Re: The crushing lameness of April Fools Day on the Internet.

#33

Post by 5fs3 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #17
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

> It seems every single company and publication that communicates via the web has a corporate communications department or something that thinks it's a corporate priority to come out with something for April Fools. It's not really the lameness of April Fools Day, it's the lameness of internet businesses, social media marketing, or marketers and salesmen in general. They need to take over, trivialize, devaluate and de…

Yep, this is it. Neutered culture intended for mass consumption, right down to the utterly safe, whimsical April Fool's Day gag -- "wow, $CORP is so random!"

An April Fool gag, even if carried out by a corp can be funny if it is truly random. I got fooled by the BigCorp I contract to when they put up a makeshift sign up asking us to consider covering our faces, because the parking had been fumigated ("although we expect it to be safe"). It played right into our prejudices about the declining health and safety culture in my country.

The problem, in my opinion, with gags like Google's is that they are utterly predictable. They are safe, and have no "edge" - which is sensible, since they don't want to alienate customers, but utterly fail as jokes.

Re: The crushing lameness of April Fools Day on the Internet.

#34

Post by TeMPOraL »

onion2k wrote: post #23

If your hypothesis is correct and the reason that April Fool's jokes are lame is because there's one day dedicated to them every year, " an entire day every year ", then a rational proposal for a solution would be for companies to put random funny things out more often. If we had a "Fool's Day" every month then there wouldn't be such a shock, and they'd start to be something enjoyable rather than laboured. Additional…

> rational proposal for a solution would be for companies to put random funny things out more often

The best way would be if they put those funny things at random, i.e. not on a specified date known by everyone in advance.

But IMO the root of the problem is not the day, it's that 'being funny' is not a terminal goal for companies. They make jokes to drive sales/traffic, whereas humour is something that has to be done for its own sake.

This is the same difference I think makes SpaceX and Tesla so awesome compared to others - because going to space and electrifying transport for humanity's good are terminal goals for Musk, and not - like with most businesses - proxies for making money (i.e. a company would stop doing what it's doing and start selling useless widgets if it paid more).

Re: The crushing lameness of April Fools Day on the Internet.

#36

Post by 001sky »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

> It seems every single company and publication that communicates via the web has a corporate communications department or something that thinks it's a corporate priority to come out with something for April Fools. It's not really the lameness of April Fools Day, it's the lameness of internet businesses, social media marketing, or marketers and salesmen in general. They need to take over, trivialize, devaluate and de…

This. Every single holiday. Is The Same. Problem.

Re: The crushing lameness of April Fools Day on the Internet.

#37

Post by jedrek »

April Fools' Day is amateur hour for people who aren't funny the other 364 days of the year. It's much like New Year's Eve for people who don't party or Valentine's Day for people who aren't romantic. They feel like they have to do this on this exact day, which of course leads to an embarrassing situation for everybody.
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