Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Theory of Creepiness

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–75 of 75 posts

Re: A Theory of Creepiness

#71

Post by sargun »

tedks wrote: post #26
icanhackit wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm stating the obvious but it's spiking every October in anticipation of Halloween. Ignoring those spikes and looking at the growth trend that began around 2007, it looks fairly organic and has remained relatively flat since mid 2014. What kicked it off in 2007 I don't know. The term has simply become a short-hand way of describing something that brings unease. The problem with the term is that people aren't actuall…

>What kicked it off in 2007 I don't know. The internet meme of "creepypasta," probably. See /r/nosleep for the sanitized version. This is the meme cluster that yielded Slenderman, BEKs, and the SCP project.

Both of those other memes are on the decline right now: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=creepy,cree...

You'll find they peaked in 2014, and it took them until 2010 to become popular.

Re: A Theory of Creepiness

#72

Post by acaciapalm »

Red_Tarsius wrote: post #66
acaciapalm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you are hateful people. I've been a woman walking around with unshaven legs -- men recoil with disgust, tell me I am a "hairy beast", etc. It's been this way since middle school. Men are not the only ones to put up with disgust from the opposite sex. Dealing with this universal human experience should not make you "lose respect" for 50% of the population because we are not a homogenous lump, we are individuals a…

I'm sorry you had to endure such insults. My post wasn't written out of hatred and I apologize if it came off that way. Sometimes I let past issues get the best of me. But I really appreciate the way you describe it – " Dealing with this universal human experience ". I hope my manners didn't turn you off HN. It's a great community to be part of. You learn something new every day from developers of all walks of life!…

Non preoccuparti :)

Re: A Theory of Creepiness

#73

Post by tedks »

sargun wrote: post #71
tedks wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What kicked it off in 2007 I don't know. The internet meme of "creepypasta," probably. See /r/nosleep for the sanitized version. This is the meme cluster that yielded Slenderman, BEKs, and the SCP project.

Both of those other memes are on the decline right now: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=creepy,cree... You'll find they peaked in 2014, and it took them until 2010 to become popular.

Well, Slenderman had the video game Slender popularize the meme, so I would expect the trend to be dominated by people who came to the meme via that game rather than the organic growth. From that chart it looks to me like creepy started spiking around the same time creepypasta did. To be fair, creepypasta is the name of a genre at its origin source, whereas most people are going to see stories downstream of the origin and search for them with queries like "creepy black eye kids" or something.

I guess I would qualify that I think this meme is probably what caused the 2007 spike. Later growth in the creepy space is probably more due to online dating becoming popularized; this would allow creeps to be creepy with virtually no possibility of retribution.

Re: A Theory of Creepiness

#74

Post by tedks »

viewer5 wrote: post #58
tedks wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What kicked it off in 2007 I don't know. The internet meme of "creepypasta," probably. See /r/nosleep for the sanitized version. This is the meme cluster that yielded Slenderman, BEKs, and the SCP project.

What's sanitized about /r/nosleep? I've poked through that sub a little, but I haven't gone specifically searching for creepypasta elsewhere, so I haven't been able to see a difference.

Reddit tends towards sanitization because it's so easy to kill something on /new and so hard to break into /hot on bigger subreddits. On any subreddit where new posts aren't immediately on /hot, only the cadre that browses /new is going to influence what is allowed, and only the things that pass that cadre and are massively palatable are going to become popular.

On /r/nosleep, I think this plays out just as somewhat more tame stories becoming popular. People are going to downvote stories that actually make them uncomfortable. The demographic on reddit is older and so a lot of the stories are family-centric which I think takes away from the horror (there aren't many Lovecraft stories where his adorable 3 year old is actually something else, because Lovecraft wouldn't want to write about an adorable 3 year old in the first place).

To see this in the large, you can check out the top post on /r/nosleep of all time, which is this ama-style bag of short anecdotes told from the point of view of a search and rescue ranger: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/3iex1h/im_a_search...

It's very much in the style of a usual reddit post, making it accessible to redditors. It has many short, shallow anecdotes, which is good for upvotes because if someone likes at least one, they'll upvote it, but it's bad for the horror, because rather than something longer-form that expands on a single theme, you get these little snippets that aren't very immersive. It's creepy, but not horrific.

Re: A Theory of Creepiness

#75

Post by visakanv »

dang wrote: post #68
Jerry2 wrote: post #9

I found this essay interesting: > It’s not “creepy” if he’s hot. I freely admit it. When a very attractive stranger approaches me and tells me I’m beautiful, it brightens my day. When a guy who is short, fat or balding does it, it makes my skin crawl no matter how tactful he is about it. I just want him to go away. I’m not alone in feeling this way. Most women feel the same, but hide the true extent of it when the gu…

I'm sure it was unintentional, but you seriously derailed this thread by bringing in a truckload of extraneous provocation. Tangents to marginally related things can be interesting, but the fact that an unrelated essay also uses the word 'creepy' isn't sufficient reason to turn an HN discussion into a flamewar. If the quote had been from the OP it would have been one thing, but BYOE (bringing your own explosives) is…

Sorry, I legitimately thought it was interesting and relevant
Post reply on HN