
Humor on the web and how to stop it - shalmanese
http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-1-humor-on-the-web-how-to-stop-it/
======
goodside
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.

~~~
shalmanese
This is interesting. Thanks for the info.

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elblanco
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.

~~~
ohyes
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.

~~~
shalmanese
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.

~~~
jacobolus
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.

~~~
elblanco
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.

------
user24
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.

~~~
elblanco
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.

------
AndyKelley
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.

~~~
rimantas

      The #python IRC channel has a "NO LOL" policy. That channel
      is one of the most helpful channels on Freenode.
    

Does it proof anything?

~~~
rimantas
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…

Post hoc ergo propter hoc?

------
shalmanese
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.

~~~
jacobolus
A response: <http://xkcd.com/794/>

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.

~~~
shalmanese
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.

~~~
jacobolus
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.

~~~
shalmanese
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?

~~~
jacobolus
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.

~~~
shalmanese
It's funnier because the people who are joking know each other and are able to
affect each other's lives in much more significant ways.

------
wtracy
The title isn't very descriptive of what's actually in the article, but the
article itself is a very good insight to the 4chan mentality.

If you are doing any kind of a social/crowd-sourcing website, you need to
understand the topics mentioned in this article, or it will bite you.

~~~
twinwing
om nom nom nom

~~~
tdoggette
This is actually a great example of how to discourage stupid humor on a
(mostly) serious website.

Heck, I downvoted it.

------
moron4hire
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.

~~~
shalmanese
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.

------
param
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)

~~~
Natsu
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."

------
brudgers
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.

------
frou_dh
That's a good observation: that humour online is mainly about showing off
rather than bonding, like offline.

~~~
Volscio
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."

------
TeHCrAzY
Are there any design/font people that can tell me why the font in the article
is so hard to read?

~~~
lambda
It looks fine to me. What browser/OS combination are you using?

~~~
TeHCrAzY
win server 2k8 (r1) + Chrome.

------
jsharpe
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."

~~~
Splines
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.

------
edkennedy
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.

------
darkhorse
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.

~~~
Volscio
I think that says more about your perception of the world than online users'
perceptions of the world.

