Let's Jam this Bog with Roasts

[Evil Ash]

Oh haha yeah, the "CAN-FAP" is 100% intentional, and hilarious.

[Dave Miles]

well now its a bit less funny knowing it was intentional

[Rabid Dinosaur]

Originally Posted by Evil Ash

I know the guy who runs that group.

I wanna make some joke about this but I don't really know what.

[Bobby Swisha]

have you claimed to be friends with the director of the canadian foreskin awareness project? (page 1, 2)

[Slime]

i end up on the bodybuilding forums so much when searching random shit. those forums must be huge

[Happyjuice]

-

[Tuna Hematoma]

[Trooper]

Whut killed the dinosaurs? THE I SAGE!

[Slade]

anyone else noticed this horrible new trend in youtube comments where people make an account with a username and profile picture of one of the characters in the video and then quote one of their lines or some shit to get a bunch of likes?

what a creative new way for people to out-cunt each other

[Tuna Hematoma]

OLYMPICS ARE OVER BITCH

[Dominator Dan]

Originally Posted by Slade

anyone else noticed this horrible new trend in youtube comments where people make an account with a username and profile picture of one of the characters in the video and then quote one of their lines or some shit to get a bunch of likes?

what a creative new way for people to out-cunt each other

haha it was funny the VERY FIRST time i saw it, but after that it ugh man yeah

[Trooper]

I don't think I've seen people pointlessly quoting things but I definitely saw some character accounts a while ago. I think I was watching a video of a news report about Bin Laden's death and there was a top comment from the Bin Laden saying "Dislike!" or something. Worst part was that someone had replied to him as Obama and someone had replied to Obama as fucking Michelle Obama. It was all so silly.

[Slime]

know.

[Pirate Balloon]

Originally Posted by Trooper

I don't think I've seen people pointlessly quoting things but I definitely saw some character accounts a while ago. I think I was watching a video of a news report about Bin Laden's death and there was a top comment from the Bin Laden saying "Dislike!" or something. Worst part was that someone had replied to him as Obama and someone had replied to Obama as fucking Michelle Obama. It was all so silly.

Wow, people actually do that? Pretty sad


edit: and furthermore who thumbs-up that shit

[Lord Blazer]

Welcome to the new internet, brought to you by YouTube and Reddit.

[Slime]

systems with upvotes / likes really show how... basic most people are. not "stupid" because a lot of it is just enjoyment of things that i consider really basic to the point that it just can't be funny, like someone under the username Barack Obama saying he doesn't like a video about Bin Laden. or someone on Reddit having a username like "ButtBandit" and then the next person says "Thanks, now I understand, ButtBandit" and then the next person saying "You are taking advice from someone named ButtBandit. Welcome to the internet!" These posts would all have like +300 points if the thread was on the front page. but these things aren't funny because they are just so ridiculously simple, and have been done so many times. the people voting these posts up have probably seen the exact same joke many times before. they just don't need humor to keep advancing for it be funny to them. it can continue to reuse the exact same setup and these people will continue to laugh at it.

its not just in humor... the same happens with music, movies, etc. imagine if we could all enjoy stuff like that? the simplest shit repeated for the 20th time, and you still find it funny? that would be pretty great. instead i have to search so hard to find stuff i like and am left disappointed so often.

edit: this is unfair and there's more to it than this but its too late to delete this post

[Trooper]

Yeah, that's why the two top comments on YouTube videos are so often the same. In fact, sometimes there are a pair of top comments that say "The top comments are the same, lol!" and people upvote them just because it's true. I think people genuinely confuse truth with humour sometimes.

[Bravoie]

Ya know what I hate? When movies or shows make references to youtube. Like when a guy falls down or whatever and then another guy is recording it with his phone and says a punchline like "hellooo, youtube!" HO HO WEB 2.0 HUMOR!!

[Trooper]

Haha, yeah. There's something about a lot of movies that makes a character come across as not very well informed about the internet. Like, they know about YouTube, Facebook, Google and Wikipedia and that's it. Unless their character is a "hacker" (and I use that term loosely, because we all know how Hollywood likes to portray that concept), in which case they know everything about everything and also a lot of stuff that's completely made-up.

[Lord Blazer]

Originally Posted by Lohr

systems with upvotes / likes really show how... basic most people are. i cant really say "stupid" because a lot of it is just enjoyment of things that i consider really basic to the point that it just can't be funny, like someone under the username Barack Obama saying he doesn't like a video about Bin Laden. or someone on Reddit having a username like "ButtBandit" and then the next person says "Thanks, now I understand, ButtBandit" and then the next person saying "You are taking advice from someone named ButtBandit. Welcome to the internet!" These posts would all have like +300 points if the thread was on the front page. but these things aren't funny because they are just so ridiculously simple, and have been done so many times. the people voting these posts up have probably seen the exact same joke many times before. they just don't need humor to keep advancing for it be funny to them. it can continue to reuse the exact same setup and these people will continue to laugh at it.

its not just in humor... the same happens with music, movies, etc. imagine if we could all enjoy stuff like that? the simplest shit repeated for the 20th time, and you still find it funny? that would be pretty great. instead i have to search so hard to find stuff i like and am left disappointed so often.

Modern culture, specifically in humor or I guess 'humor' is no longer based around like, a setup and subversion of expectations,

But rather it's just kind of based on this weird in-joke sort of mindset? There's no other way to really explain it. There's no humor in Good Guy Greg. Internet humor and popularity has become so neutered that literally all it takes to be considered funny now is just to make something that someone else recognizes.

I mean, this sort of humor has existed forever. Recently you can point at things like Family Guy or go back and people just quoting TV shows or go back even further and you end up with classic fairy tales and folklore.

Except the speed at which we can relay these little snippets of culture has become negligible if not nonexistant, so there's never any change to any of this. Look at the difference between a German Cinderella vs French Cinderella vs Russian Cinderella and you'll see all these cultural insertions from different countries, but each tale comes from the same origin, because these had time to develop and spread.

But then, I take a photo of my friend steve and slap some macro text on it and call him Scumbag Steve and submit it to Reddit right now, you'll see it in Russia and France and Germany and the US and the UK and Norway and Canada and Brazil and South Africa simultaneously. And they will share it with other people and within minutes it will have touched every technologically-forward country on earth. And someone will attempt to insert their own variation on this cultural product, and it'll be about scumbag steve voting libertarian or something like that.

But because it moves so quickly, there's never any time for variations to develop and actually become something. You can look at variations of a fairy tale and see what's changed between them but observe the common threads between them.

I'll step away from talking about the cultural constructs for a moment and switch to the societal construct. The internet circa ten years ago was largely devoted to discussion boards, much like 3dmm here, or even 4chan or Fark or Digg. The structure was different, but the idea was still the same in that it was based around discussion.

In 2012, the internet saw the rise of Reddit and 9Gag and Imgur and so on and so on. Rather than actually having a discussion, you discuss things more or less just by clicking an arrow that points one way or the other. Suddenly, you've done two very harmful things to the way culture works.
One, you've given a person a quantitative measurement of how good their post was. Rather than just having a discussion about a funny cat video or a cool photo of a tree, the motivation is there to hoard little up arrows.
Two, you've removed any investment the user on the other end has to appreciate or discuss the content in question. You've reduced it to simply clicking an up or down arrow, or if you go to Imgur, you can do it all with one hand on your arrow keys and never move your arm.
What this does is incentivize people to just submit easy content. Rather than making a cool photoshop, why not post a funny screengrab from a popular TV show? Why not slap some macro text on a photo that already exists? Why go through all the trouble of creating culture when I can just recycle something else and get more recognition from it?

This isn't entirely restricted to Reddit and co, of course. I tend to use Something Awful as my counterexample but 3dmm works just as fine. We have plenty of little memes and bits that we reuse but there's never any instant approval for it. Parody threads are plenty common and it's not really creating anything new or doing anything different than a new scumbag steve post. The difference is that we don't have a like system of any sort. If you make a good parody thread or a bad parody thread, you'll usually get the same reaction unless it actually makes sense and a discussion breaks out (healthy/wealthy threads are a recent example)

Instead, people make funny posts and parody threads (typically) because they think it's actually funny. There's an actual bit of humor to it.

If 3dmm had a like/dislike system, you'd see nothing but low effort parody threads and the ilk. Photos of Will Maltby with macro text slapped on them that get hundreds (dozens) of upvotes because "THATS WILL MALTBY AND I RECOGNIZE HIM"

I've just kind of been typing for a while and I really feel like I should get around to writing up a real essay about Reddit and the end of culture

but uh I dunno

I just hate to see what we've done to culture and how we perceive culture and what it means to create culture. I draw the comparison to the Rick James episode of Chapelle's Show. That episode was funny. But then people said "I'm Rick James, bitch" over and over again and it stopped being funny. It isn't this time-tested bit of humor. It isn't 'why did the chicken cross the road.' It was something funny that got mangled and destroyed and forgotten in the name of being in on the joke.

[Lord Blazer]

Shit that's a lot of words I just typed and didn't format all that well or even proofread

[Lord Blazer]

basically this

[Slime]

Originally Posted by Lord Blazer

Modern culture, specifically in humor or I guess 'humor' is no longer based around like, a setup and subversion of expectations,

But rather it's just kind of based on this weird in-joke sort of mindset? There's no other way to really explain it. There's no humor in Good Guy Greg. Internet humor and popularity has become so neutered that literally all it takes to be considered funny now is just to make something that someone else recognizes.

yeah this is what i was thinking about after i made that post. a lot of it seems to just be some sort of comfort from recognizing things and feeling like you are part of "the club". its why so many self-referential Reddit posts make it to the top, its why lame internet jokes in media like what Trooper mentioned pass as "funny", its why there are 1 million gangnam style "parodies" are so highly rated on youtube, its why shit like Epic Movie gets to keep being made

[Lord Blazer]

'the club' now includes basically every internet user, which is what makes it so ... I don't know the word. Not irksome, not annoying

Insufferable?

[Slime]