Just because Jerry Seinfeld, George Carlin, and Randall Munroe can be funny whenever they want to doesen’t mean you can.
April fools’ is the time of the year, when everyone thinks they’re being funny but they’re just being dicks. And when someone thinks pictures of cats with horribly disfigured grammar is funny, you know it’s going to get really pathetic. I’m talking about you – the Internet.
A lot of people know that I have a short term memory length of nearly three seconds in the morning. I spend about five minutes reading my feeds in the morning and I was pleasantly surprised to see interesting and breaking news just to get fooled, and this happened six times in the morning.
I’m pretty sure a conversation like this has happened several places in the world at this time:
Billy: Hey grampa, <enter tragic news here>
Grampa: (goes into shock)
Billy: April fools’!
Grampa: Oh god, I find it hard to breathe, there’s pain in my left arm.
Billy: Good one grampa, but you’re going to have to try harder than that to get me.
Grampa: I’m not kidding, get me to a hospital.
Billy: Get more creative than that
The worst of all seems to be that of slideshare. I’d signed up for their service, which I actually think is pretty neat.
I got an email saying: “You’re a slideshare rockstar”(IF you didn’t know already, “rockstar” is the word I loathe the most.) Now that I’m a slideshare rockstar and was impatiently looking for ways to find slideshare groupies, I smelled something fishy.
“
We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.
Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.
Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team“
Every self obsessed half witted moron (a sample set, which, by some freakish coincidence, are all twitter users), decided to blog, twaat, microblog, nanoblog, fermiblog and gloat about their newfound glory. After seeing the pageviews rise and increase hundredfold, they realized that their creative inputs were clearly worth billions. They quit their jobs, brought hundreds of “I’m a slideshare rockstar” Tshirts, maxed out their credit limit knowing that a few minutes on powerpoint would reimburse their investment.
Then they found out that it was a joke with 100x fake page views and everyone got the same email.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people are pissed at slideshare, which is pretty sad because I’m a fan of Rashmi Sinha’s work, which I’ve been following for quite a while now.
There’s a lesson to be learned here, in my opinion:
- Humour is contextual. A normal person can be clever and insert a few puns into their text, but that’s it. The funniest jokes are internal, the ones that you crack with your buds, and have a lot of context to them.
- What slideshare did wasn’t “fooling”, it was outright lying. I just hope that it doesen’t get them sued or something.
- It’s funny to make one or two people laugh. Try it for an entire userbase and you’ll just piss them off.
0 Response to “Morons. All of them.”