Friday, February 24, 2012

An MKM Blog Tutorial: How To Ruin Someone Else's Clever Joke In One Easy Step

(1) Do this.

8 comments:

  1. I don't think you follow. See, Craig T. Nelson is also a prominent Craig, and he used to star in the defunct television show "Coach."

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  2. It didn't ruin the joke.

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    1. Fair enough. Mattingley's Sideburns' material is kevlar. But it's sort of like when your neighbor doesn't cut their grass and leaves the El Camino they haven't driven in 30 years out on their front lawn on blocks. It's a fucking eyesore even next to a beautiful mansion.

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  3. No, it really didn't.

    It was a pretty dopey joke, but its presence didn't detract from the humor or the impact of the preceding joke, which we all liked.

    It's not a dog turd on the Mona Lisa, it's a picture of a dog turd hanging next to the Mona Lisa.

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  4. I disagree with this line of thinking, and I think it does far more harm than good. What's worse for the site: the occasional clumsy joke reply, or depressed commenting numbers because people feel like riffing on each other's jokes and trying to build pyramids is likely to get them singled out by the cool kids' table?

    Pre-redesign, the site was swimming with joke replies. There were great commenters who seemed to never reply to a comment with anything but another joke. People felt like they had room to try stuff and play around without fear that they were going to "ruin" some egomaniac's delicate snowflake of a comment. And when you read the comments, there was the real sense that it was a group of people having fun and at least semi-collaboratively making a funny comment section, rather than a bunch of competitive, territorial jerks insisting that everyone else give them a 20-foot-radius for their recital.

    What's unfortunate is that on an individual basis, commenters are as good now as they've ever been. But they don't interact in any way other than polite golf claps. There's maybe one pyramid every three weeks, always involving the same half-dozen commenters.

    I'm not laying that at the feet of this blog, but singling out some guy because he tried to make a joke (and failed) doesn't help. It just doesn't help. How about instead of trying to end the completely non-existent epidemic of bad replies, you put your efforts toward encouraging people to take chances and try to build a funny, welcoming, vibrant comment section together?

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    1. Absolutely agree with this.

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    2. Thanks for a comment that obviously involved a lot more thought than the original post. I do think that this blog generally encourages people to participate, take chances, and enjoy commenting. I don't think picking on the occasional sloppy (at best), lazy and worthless (at worst) comment undermines that goal, but you're surely entitled to disagree. There is a reason, beyond sheer laziness, that I've never tried my hand at an MBA style Duds roundup, and that's that I don't think it's in keeping with the essence of this blog, which is to score cheap, fun, inoffensive laughs.

      Look, people like to stare at car wrecks. And on a completely satirical blog about comments on a blog, I don't think occasionally laughing at disasters does anything to dissuade people from trying their hand at pyramids. Hell, I started a pyramid yesterday that drew 40+ replies. I assume the people reading this blog are, by and large, regular Deadspin commenters who "get it." I sincerely doubt the occasional poster who comes along and lobs a hapless "Sandusky!!!1!" reference bothers to read a hyper-meta blog about the personalities of the 2009 COTY runner up and his friends.

      If I am wrong about that, I am sincerely sorry, since it was never my intent to dissuade anyone from trying something, but it is also neither the first nor last time I was wrong.

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