Reddit, Tildes and their culture/behavior surrounding jokes. What are your thoughts on them?

Askme_about_penguins
2018-09-04T00:02:34Z

Do you sometimes find yourself typing up a joke reply typical of Reddit but then remember this is Tildes and stop? I do it quite often (less and less the more time I spend on the site, however).

I'm even doing it less and less on Reddit itself. Like, yeah, the puns is one of the things I used to love about Reddit the most when I first joined. But that's sort of the problem.

There's always new people joining and finding the beaten-to-death jokes hilarious and so they upvote them. Which means, after one year or two 90% of Reddit jokes are old to you and have been repeated ad nauseam.

Not only that, but since they're a quick and sure way to gain others' approval (via karma) people often try to force them anywhere. No matter how inappropriate they are at that time, how forced and out of place they look. To the point that they're often the first child comment of serious comments asking serious questions.

Which means that if you're interested in reading the serious answer to that question you have scroll down past the joke, and that's even provided there's an actual answer. And I'm pretty sure many questions are left unanswered because whoever has a relevant serious answer won't feel like wasting their time typing up a reply no one will see because it will be buried under the joke reply.

With that said, what do you think of “silly” or “witty” jokes on Tildes? Do you think they should be encouraged? Discouraged? That nothing should be done about them? What about the ones that get repeated ad nauseam, are they even controllable?

I also just remembered there was talk about introducing a “joke” tag that would allow users to not see them if they don't want to or to see only jokes if they so wish. What do you think of this tag proposal? I think it could be very, very useful.

Disclaimer:

There is a chance that some users will interpret this post as some form of rant or an attempt at policing the site even further. I just want to state that my objective with this post is to spark a general and open discussion about this topic, to gauge the opinions of other users and get a feel for what the general community thinks about them (if there's an overwhelming majority that shares an opinion, or if the community is highly fragmented with regards to the topic and if so, in what proportions... etc), to see if there's anything that we can do about it or if there's anything that should be done at all, for example. I am not trying to spark controversy or drama and I mean my post to be one that's constructive, friendly, in good faith and respectful and not on that's toxic or negative or disrespectful.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~talk/5wh/reddit_tildes_and_their_culture_behavior_surrounding_jokes_what_are_your_thoughts_on_them

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