The crushing lameness of April Fools Day on the Internet.
I just don't find being pounded with systematic absurdity for an entire day every year as being very funny.
I don't know how to solve it. It seems every single company and publication that communicates via the web has a corporate communications department or something that thinks it's a corporate priority to come out with something for April Fools. The Internet systematizes, amplifies, focuses, fully resources, funds, schedules, plans and implements high production value foolery. Corporate drone: "Larry, Sergey, have you signed off yet on this years $4M April Fools budget? How are we going to attract and recruit the best engineers unless we've got a reputation for the very best and most foolish April Fools trickery?" Ugh.
It's just kind of silly and boring and makes we wish April 2 would come as soon as possible. As I read the Internet on April 1 I just try to self filter out all the silly unbelievable garbage. Most news sites (including HN) are hardly worth reading April 1.
You know when someone who thinks they are funny insists on telling lame jokes, and the audience feels an obligation to give an acknowledging guffaw? It's like an whole Internet day worth of that.
I feel like the Grinch Who Stole April Fools but really it has to be said. If you've got it in mind to do some fine ol' foolin then maybe the classy thing to do is leave the foolin to others and spare us one more depressingly lame absurdity.
174 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadWe should be allowed to have fun, but this is hardly funny - it's painful.
It's not really the lameness of April Fools Day, it's the lameness of internet businesses, social media marketing, or marketers and salesmen in general. They need to take over, trivialize, devaluate and destroy every thing that becomes special in society, in hope to get some additional sales. I also don't know how to solve this, but April Fools Day is only a more visible than usual demonstration of a problem that happens every single day.
I think half the annoyance is most of the time, unfunny people reveal themselves on this day.
The problem, in my opinion, with gags like Google's is that they are utterly predictable. They are safe, and have no "edge" - which is sensible, since they don't want to alienate customers, but utterly fail as jokes.
The original carnival days like "Feast of Fools" [0] were an outlet for subversive undercurrents in the otherwise immobile medieval societies. You could be Pope for a day, but you were still a beggar for the rest of your life and nothing would change that.
Marketers who play April Fools unwittingly paint themselves as the beggar in this scenario. It's like they're broadcasting a message: "I feel like my work has no meaning in this world, but at least today I get to pretend that I'm the one making the news."
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Fools
So what you are saying is I should be pulling stupid pranks today...
That's a copout, like blaming the legitimately elected political leaders in a democracy.
_People_ do this to holidays and special events because they are easily impressed and inclined to follow social trends like lemmings.
If people weren't so impressed by lameness, then the advertisers and marketers would attempt other ways to gather eyeballs.
I shudder when I think of how unreadable I used to find Slashdot every April 1st (back when I was reading it).
It's a feedback loop; one that is arguably easier to break on the marketer's side. OTOH posts such as OP's complaint are attempt to break that loop on the side of people by signalling that well, we're fed up with crap. I doubt any marketer will listen though.
Plugging a couple of obvious holes in the dike does no good when the dike is fundamentally unsound.
So this leads to an obvious question: how do we fix the dike?
In general, the same way it's always done: years of social activism, patient stating and re-stating of your case to an uncaring public who is barely impacted by your position, possible civil disobedience (though I have no idea what form that would take in this context... Being told by our employer to roll out an April Fool's project and responding "No, it's a waste of our time and our customers' time, I'm not doing it" perhaps).
With regards to April Fool's: I wouldn't bother. It's a once-a-year annoyance, not nearly as disruptive as Christmas. If your goal is to encourage people to knock off nonsense, than I'd easily start with the pagan-holiday-cum-Christian-nativity-celebration-cum-marketing-extravaganza that we hold every December; it's far more disruptive to the economy and people's psychological well-being.
If you find April Fool's too annoying, take a personal day and tune out; go read a book, go on a walk, take the disruption of functional communication on the Internet as an opportunity to step back from the Internet. Use the opportunity to look around at the world outside the screen and see what needs improvement; maybe you'll come back on April 2nd inspired.
There is alien life out there, organized into a federation. Their technology is so advanced to ours that remaining invisible to us is trivial. In order for our species to qualify for membership, we must first survive a series of evil pranks designed to kill or intellectually stultify us in the most darkly ironic way possible.
This is why we have automobiles, nuclear weapons, and April Fools.
user: hoodoof created: 1055 days ago karma: 704 avg: 1.51 about:
They're not different than anyone who's ever done marketing, it's just that most single individuals in industrialized nations have almost effortless access to potential audiences only Popes and heads of state had several hundred years ago. Ever been in an open air marketplace? In a lot of places in the world, everyone is shouting in the marketplace.
Another of Garret Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons"
I am a CTO in a startup, and everyday I'm either selling an idea within the company, or selling a product to customers. All this back and forth produces great insights on the software we're developing as well as in the business itself. I wouldn't be able to do this kind of thing if I hand't learned valuable lessons selling surf and skateboard goods on my family business back when I was a teenager. Also, around the same time I started a t-shirt business with a cousin which instantly got me interested in graphic design, and marketing. I did all that while programming on the side as I still do nowadays.
Sales is all about serving the customer. Marketing is all about conquering the customer by heart, and message. Both skills are of extreme importance in any business, specially in startups. Instead of bashing, we should embrace these disciplines.
After all, we can only profit from them.
I'm happy to embrace honest selling, but that seems to be a completely different mindset than most of the sales I saw. If your product is really good and provides value to the customer (instead of trying to extract value out of a customer), then the salesman/marketer has an easier job in 'conquering our hearts', and doesn't need to resort to mental hacks or things that are plainly annoying. I'm happy to pay more for such a product, sold by honest people.
What's your startup, by the way? :).
When operated by communication offices with little contact with the company’s culture, like most attempt, it falls flat. Otherwise, those can be very representative of a company’s culture, and I would recommend checking their last prank before applying to a company (if you expect to have the luxury to choose). It you think it’s funny, edgy, or demonstrate an expertise, than yes, you might be on track.
A couple of GMail’s pranks have been illustrative of that: creepy to people without knowledge of databases, yet funny because obviously non-scalable to people familiar with large on-line structure.
Humour is by far the most revealing element of anyone’s culture, and that’s why I like questions like ‘Tell me a joke’ during interviews — although, to be honest, I’ve only asked it when being the interviewee.
Now, our media diet consists of hundreds of channels, sites and blogs, and it seems like every single one of them does an April Fools gag
The result is tired, formulaic humor, repeated ad nauseam.
Complaining is not whining. Complaining is not furtive. Complaining is speaking up.
I call BS on the attitude that complaining is really a public service, that its done with the highest motives. Its done to vent, to gain sympathy, to feel better. Not to help.
Is asking to be escalated to a manager when you call your ISP after numerous failings by level 1 support to adequately solve-to your satisfaction promulgating 'whininess'?
End of the day whatever your chosen nomenclature of "I had the expectation of X and the responsible parties failed, so I'm going to speak up about it" it's just my lone opinion that calling it "victimizing yourself" is absurd.
I would actually discourage anyone from taking a job from any company that takes April Fools too seriously. Having to put in extra hours to get the April Fools out in time is the only thing that's more soul-crushing than the stupid corporate joke itself.
The question is whether a joke is funny and made you smile of course.
I guess this is a first world problem
I don't know why its so funny to think of you getting irritated by this, but it is.
I think your problem is just that on the internet you are just exposed to a lot more of them.
Additionally, we'd need people to make them, so employment would increase, and people could sell merchandise promoting the best jokes, services to quantify what's funny, and so on, so there'd be business opportunities created too.
This could be the start of a whole new industry.
The best way would be if they put those funny things at random, i.e. not on a specified date known by everyone in advance.
But IMO the root of the problem is not the day, it's that 'being funny' is not a terminal goal for companies. They make jokes to drive sales/traffic, whereas humour is something that has to be done for its own sake.
This is the same difference I think makes SpaceX and Tesla so awesome compared to others - because going to space and electrifying transport for humanity's good are terminal goals for Musk, and not - like with most businesses - proxies for making money (i.e. a company would stop doing what it's doing and start selling useless widgets if it paid more).
However...
They are a 'joke' in the broadest sense of the word, but not a joke. I am not 'fooled'.
A true April Fool's Day joke is about pulling the wool over someone's eyes in such a way that they really do not know if it is true or not.
Then they ruined it with their stream of fake shitty joke news.
I think next year I'm going to take the advice posted by someone else here and just take April 1 off. I'll just spend the day playing games or something else away from anything other people are doing.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/1ba1/?pfm=af14_homepage_Fea...
Sure, it's silly... but it's fun.
Some tech sites will do the same with ridiculous stuff. 04/1/14: Python 2.8 to lose the GIL. HAHAHAHAHAHA DO YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?! It doesn't even make sense.
I would like to point out that this issue extends to other, especially North American happenings. As soon as Haloween, the super bowl or "the Oscars" are up, the internet becomes almost unusable because all the sites with user-"shared" (let's be honest, it is rarely really generated by them) content have no other topics and half of the news sites appear to have nothing better to do then to comment on the obvious real life events; even worse, the European news sites will start commenting on the American stuff as well. It is times like this when I get out old 90's PC Single Player games just to be away from people for a while.
I have the dumbest sense of humor and will laugh about almost anything but April 1st is just gear-grindingly annoying...
Out of their comfort zone, feeling social force to try to be funny, they overextend themselves in obvious ways.
I'm keeping this in my "quotable quotes" file - do you have a preferred attribution, or is "jedrek" sufficient?
I contend there are worse things that businesses can do with their time than think up bad jokes. Let's keep some perspective here, people.
1. Using "agile" as a noun.
2. Meetings.
3. Conflating http and CRUD with high tech.
The one time I went to an organized party on NYE, the bathrooms were all vomited over by 11pm.
Opportunities to act differently for one day of the year are more valuable than that. That way, you can explore a side of you without being "inconsistent" with your usual public self, or get to know a different side of other people.
Anyone can decide to dress up like a pirate on any given day, but most of will wait for Halloween to enjoy it.
You should realize that this is the internet, not America, and April's Fool is an American tradition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day#Origins
I really don't see anything to be mad about.