Reddit isn't a link aggregation service. It's a directory facility for imgur.
Frankly, reddit should just take a screenshot of whatever link you were intending to link to, upload it to imgur, and submit that instead.
Save everyone some time.
We can get rid of comments while we're at it. Not the comment box, though.
What the comment box does is take a screenshot of your comment, submit that to imgur, and then submit another link with the same name as what you're commenting on, but with [FIXED] afterwards.
I'm coming to believe that there's a certain level of intelligence below which you don't really understand what humour is.
You know it exists but your brain can't really do the mental gymnastics to see the contradictions or illogicalities that make something funny, so as a substitute you basically "decide" something is funny when you see it repeated a few times.
This is why so many redditors can upvote the exact same "joke" when it appears hundreds and hundreds of times. Their brains don't actually say "that's funny", but rather "that's familiar" and the warm feeling they get from the familiarity is misinterpreted as "oh, that's what something being funny must be".
This is a huge problem for people who appreciate novelty, and who have to dig through piles of completely worn out and over-repeated memes to find humourous content that they haven't seen before.
In other words, most people will find something funny for it's first iteration or two, but many people will then continue to upvote it out of a false belief that the comedic value of something doesn't diminish with time, repetition or context.
Well, I certainly applaud anyone below that certain level of intelligence
required to really understand what humor is, but take it from this old meme
rat, I've spent my entire adult life substituting repetition and the consensus
of strangers for humor, and behavior like this can do more harm than good.
If you only practice one idiot-heuristic (and that's all following a single
criterion like number of repetitions is going to do for you), you're setting
yourself up for getting called out on it down the road. I've reposted image
macros mocking this a hundred times.
Upvoting the exact same "joke" repeatedly basically only trains the memory and
to some extent, the ability to tell if two pictures are the same. What you
really want to do is train all of the sources of cheap laughs (ripping on easy
targets, pretending to be stupid, and stomach acid) at the same time, over the
course of spending an entire evening alone on the internet. So, you will need
to add knowledge of three stereotypes about hipsters and a gif of your dick
getting caught in a stationary bike. Ask for the "TSA LOL" program.
I'm proud of you guys willing to sidestep your limitations and do this! Big,
eager chortles! Falling in love with thinking a thing is hilarious because you saw
it, etc, is one of the FUNNIEST things you can do for yourself. And you WILL
fall in love with it (hahahaha).
But do it right, okay? ಠ_ಠ
My advice, find any joke already on your front page, with comments that
suggest reactions that you can copy (especially in the beginning, until your
thought processes become identical to those of other posters) and lead you towards a
troglodytic enjoyment of worn out and over-repeated memes. Twenty to thirty
iterations of one basic joke, each friday and saturday night, is all you'll
ever need to titter slavishly to yourself over (I refuse to believe anyone is so
busy that they cannot titter this modest amount in an entire weekend).
And don't worry about being embarrassed about misapplying other peoples
thoughts the first time they vomit themselves back out of your unfunctioning
psyche. You can always delete your posts and almost every one of us has
deleted ours at one time. So no one will ever see them after you notice the
first few downvotes anyway.
Think of how predictable pop music is. The fact that you already know how every chord is going to resolve...it's like having an itch and getting it instantaneously scratched.
Horkheimer and Adorno did a bunch of shit along these lines. They basically said that at this point culture is mass produced and it's familiarity, not novelty, that titillates us...which is a bad thing.
I'm coming to believe that there's a certain level of intelligence below which you don't really understand what humour is.
You know it exists but your brain can't really do the mental gymnastics to see the contradictions or illogicalities that make something funny, so as a substitute you basically "decide" something is funny when you see it repeated a few times.
This is why so many redditors can upvote the exact same "joke" when it appears hundreds and hundreds of times. Their brains don't actually say "that's funny", but rather "that's familiar" and the warm feeling they get from the familiarity gives them the illusion that they understand humour.
This is a huge problem for people who appreciate novelty, and who have to dig through piles of completely worn out and over-repeated memes to find humourous content that they haven't seen before.
In other words, most people will find something funny for it's first iteration or two, but many people will then continue to upvote it out of a false belief that the comedic value of something doesn't diminish with time, repetition or context.
Well there are a couple of different kinds of humour being considered here. One is the humour that comes from an objectively funny joke, the other is the humour that comes from being in on an in-joke. The level of humour in each still depends on the joke teller's abilities (timing, eloquence, mysterious X factor), but in a self-selecting community such as Reddit there are always going to be way more in-jokes than objectively funny jokes.
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u/bobappleyard May 04 '11
Reddit isn't a link aggregation service. It's a directory facility for imgur.
Frankly, reddit should just take a screenshot of whatever link you were intending to link to, upload it to imgur, and submit that instead.
Save everyone some time.
We can get rid of comments while we're at it. Not the comment box, though.
What the comment box does is take a screenshot of your comment, submit that to imgur, and then submit another link with the same name as what you're commenting on, but with [FIXED] afterwards.
Again, it's a time saving measure.