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.
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.
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.
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.
The community norms around here reward humor that is (1) relevant to the topic at hand, and (2) insightful, and additionally (3) not mean-spirited.
Trolls only have an outsized influence to the extent that the rest of the community has fuzzy or differing ideas about community norms. The larger the community the more likely this becomes. Trolls work by flirting with the boundaries of acceptability.
I agree with this. Every so often a little humor slips through the HN downvote filter and it usually fits your supplied parameters. I'd also add (4) not ironic or sarcastic (5) not absurd.
Crafting a joke that fits all that is probably worth an upvote just on principle.
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 hinthint" 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
I think you need much more evidence. The reason that most of the offline written material we look at (e.g. famous novels) is “substantive” by comparison with online material (e.g. YouTube comments), is that the vast vast majority of the complete crap has been filtered out by editorial and publishing processes, or lost to time. The reason that internet jokes seem obscure to people not in the internet community is not that they’re “operationally different” than other jokes, but just that jokes quite often lose meaning out of context.
I would guess that if you looked for instance at the letters received by congressmen or newspapers, you’d find just about the same amount of incomprehensible garbage.
I dispute your claim that there is a substantively different purpose to the use of “humor” in online writing vs. online writing: it doesn’t match my experience. But even if it happens to be true in some sense, your essay doesn’t provide convincing evidence.
* * *
On the other hand, I think your commentary about the internet having a “citizenry” is pretty interesting.
I agree, the purpose of the piece was not a proof, but a narrative. The long tail of quality vs edited, curatorial content is an orthogonal argument to the one I'm making.
I guess I'm arguing that, given the same person, placed in two contexts, they will produce two different types of humor and the offline version will be objectively funnier than the online version. And the core of the difference between the two is due to the affordances of the space. Is that a bit clearer?
Okay. But I would guess that the main reason that the offline one is “funnier” (insofar as that’s true at all) is that you’re more likely to know the guy making the joke. If you just walked up to a random guy on the subway and he started telling a joke, it wouldn’t be any funnier than if you found the same stranger’s e-joke.
People clearly tell different jokes to different audiences, but I don’t think the distinctions in audience here are inherent in the medium. For example, someone telling a joke in an IRC channel with a bunch of regulars who know each other will tell a different kind of joke than someone writing a Youtube comment. Likewise a guy might tell his poker buddies a different joke than he’d scrawl on the inside of a bathroom stall.
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!)
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.
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.
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)
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."
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.
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."
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".
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.