The front page of reddit can be a cruel mistress My wife and I had one of our wedding pictures take the number one spot on /r/all one day -- There was some rather embarrassing text super-imposed on it that said "Oh you think married women still give BJs" (google Condescending Wife to find it). Despite some of the comments in the thread being pretty mean, my wife and I took it in stride, we're both internet people, we…
I shaved half of my hair and half of my beard so that I'd have an interesting driver's license, and posted the photos on Reddit. So I can't really complain about someone else appropriating my image. But it did get big in a way I didn't expect. My mother found out when she went to yahoo.com to log into her email and I was on the front page. My father-in-law was watching the local news and saw me giving an interview. T…
I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything
141–150 of 400 posts
Re: I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything
#142Hipster diagnosis fail. Guy has a work ethic-- enough to actually finish writing projects-- and is therefore, by definition, not a hipster.
the whole problem likely stems from this very bothersome definition of a hipster. At a baseline, a hipster is simply "a person who follows trends and fashions in an ironic way". Different people have these other nuances and qualifiers that are applied inconsistently... "they're not a hipster unless they're also shallow and facile"... "hipsters are attention seekers"... "a hipster is somebody who tries to be one, until it stops being cool" and so on.
What irks me about these various definitions is that it's as if people are having an academic debate about which pejorative or negative stereotype deserves to be christened a "hipster", when there's already a very diverse and complex community in existence that self-identifies as such. The only context I see such a debate making sense is when people have a perverse need to somehow preserve their ire and rage against the word "hipster" after being confronted with wholesome, happy counter-examples.
This poor bloke is a guy whom a lot of regular people would quickly slot down as a hipster, just from his looks and habits. He probably self-identifies as one too (because, hey, he likes the same music and dresses the same and it's always nice to have a sense of community with like minds). And there ought not be anything wrong with it. Yet there's an active hipster-hate community that's not going to drill down into his benign motivations before shredding him up.
So what appears to be the way forward here? Collectively agreeing that it's high time to dial back the rhetoric on hipsters? Or telling the guy who thinks he's a hipster that he's not really a hipster because hipsters are supposed to be jerkfaces?
Re: I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything
#143I'm not claiming to have much fashion sense, but how is wearing giant plastic glasses "sincerity"? Is it about self-expression? What sentiment do huge glasses express? The reaction, then, had nothing to do with hipsters... they hated me because I looked like I was nakedly desperate for attention, and had gone about that attention-grabbing by glomming on to marginalized trends. I thought that was the whole reason peop…
He said later in the article that his clothes were a function of budgetary constraints. Maybe he couldn't afford well-fitting glasses.
I understand everyone has their own financial priorities, but I personally would prioritize my glasses over purchasing an iPhone (clearly visible in the first picture in the article). That being said, I'd also live in an area with a more favorable cost-of-living if I needed to busk in order to make ends meet. Though he clearly enjoys busking, and he can do as he pleases.
Point being his comment about budgetary constraints irked me.
Re: I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other funny thing is that there's a violent dislike of mainstream media on websites such as Reddit, and constant criticism when news stations take things out of context. Then they do things like this themselves on a daily basis!
^People write this comment on Reddit a lot. The one I'm about to write, they also write this one too. You can't talk about Reddit as a hivemind, because it isn't one person, or even a definite collective of people. The people who take things out of context, and the people who call them out, are different sets of people. If Reddit seems to have multiple personalities, it's because... well, it does.
That's the part that makes me cynical about humanity. Reddit isn't some unique group of particularly hateful, particularly judgmental people. They are, in the grand scheme things, a pretty typical and pretty vanilla set that's probably a decent sample of "young and western".
Which is to say, their ability to fly into a collective rage and stampede through the lives of innocent people isn't really unique to them, it's probably just a phenomenon inherent in all large groups of mostly-anonymous humans.
Reddit just gets named and shamed constantly because they are the largest group of mostly-anonymous people on the internet. Had things gone differently it'd very well be Digg in its place.
Re: I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being hipster is just trying to look cool for doing everything that isn't actually cool. Being geek is about doing things that you like that just happen to be geeky.
It's very presumptuous of you to assume that "hipsters" don't actually enjoy the things they do.
If they actually enjoy what they're doing, and not the feeling of being 'counterculture', then they're not being "hipsters". It's pretty simple.
Re: I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Context is so important. I remember seeing this on reddit and thinking that surely it must be staged satire, poking fun at the types (pun intended) of people one sees around Chelsea. Without the context of it being a piece of (really rather compelling) performance art, the photo looks like a person who is trying very hard to be noticed.
I guess the issue for me is that there is a cachet in our society for successful artists- That's why so many people want to try art, because art is "cool". But the reason art is cool is PRECISELY BECAUSE artists have to take risks and stick their necks out and have to be able to take the heat if their art gets a bad reception. It seems to me OP wanted the cachet of doing art, but doesn't want to accept the risk that…
He expected to be criticized for what he saw was the performace: writing stories. He did NOT expect to have his "Hey I'll type anything for you" sign completely hidden, and therefore the pictures about him to be taken completely out of context.
In real life, you can see something like that, and then walk around until you see the sign and have better context, and be less dismissive or confused. When all you have is a photo, that's less easy.
Re: I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything
#147Hipster-hate strikes me as just another thinly veiled form of bullying, and it's interesting to see how readily internet nerds - the people who are disproportionately to have been bullied in the past - engage in it. Look! He's different! Let's make assumptions about his motivations and get him! It's also interesting to see how many times Reddit (and other communities) fly into a rage-fest because of lack of context,…
Author summarizes the rage quite well: "The reaction, then, had nothing to do with hipsters. It was a hatred of people that need to stand out for standing-out's sake. That realization was at once positive and negative—people didn't hate me because I was a hipster, they hated me because I looked like I was nakedly desperate for attention, and had gone about that attention-grabbing by glomming on to marginalized trends…
Typically, celebrities acquire accolades for having done things of note, other than attention-seeking. [1] The ones that deliberately seek attention for its own sake get as much scorn as anyone else; they're essentially tabloid heels.
And they exist for the same reason cable news is in such a state: There just isn't enough 'news' to justify 24x7 coverage, so programming must be invented that is, by definition, not things that would otherwise be considered news. [2]
[1] Without stepping into discussion of merit, our culture does ascribe value to people who play sports well, act well, are likable parts of the media, are fashionable/attractive, etc.
[2] There are cross-overs, sure. Some famous-for-being-famous types cross over into 'actual' celebrity. But that's more an effect of the secondary content operating as a 'farm league' of sorts. They throw a lot of famous-for-being-famous / 'reality-star' stuff against the wall and graduate anything that 'sticks'.
And I personally wonder at what point the 'celebrity media' will start openly paying C and D-listers directly, to generate content.
e.g. pay a couple fashion models to go to the beach and provide photo content. maybe even get some clothing labels on-board to under-write the thing for the sake of having -their- products featured and plugged in the resulting copy.
But I digress.
Re: I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything
#148Why can't we just upvote this kind of story on Reddit and leave it there?
Re: I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything
#149It seems like the hipster-as-a-pejorative thing started around the total collapse of the music industry in the mid-2000's and unfortunately was driven by indie scenesters who resented the influx of popularity when say, Modest Mouse had a song appear on say, One Tree Hill. The primary aesthetic religion of the indie scene from punk onward, no matter what the genre or style, was D.I.Y. so suburbanites who went to Hot T…
When you call somebody a hipster...
Re: I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything
#150The website she referred to had a series of essays they dubbed “It Happened To Me” that they sprinkled in amongst feminist-leaning news and features. “I want to talk about how all of this makes me feel. You, all over the Internet, right after you dumped me.” Does that seem bizarrely self absorbed to anyone else?
Yes. And passive-aggressive, since she welched on the deal by not letting him read it before press.