Megathread: April Fools' Day 2019 on the internet
It's already started a little, but over the next day or so, the internet will be filled with jokes, pranks, fake "announcements" from companies, fun interactive activities, games, and so on. A lot of these can be quite clever and interesting so I think posting about them in general is fine, but in the interest of preventing them from completely taking over Tildes, let's try to keep as many of them restricted to this thread as possible. Ideally, a separate top-level comment for each individual item would be good.
If something particularly discussion-worthy comes up (like an ARG or activity that a lot of people want to talk about), a separate thread is reasonable, but please make sure it has the "april fools day" tag. That way, if anyone wants to avoid seeing the April Fools' Day threads, they can use the topic tag filters and filter that tag out.
I'm going to use the "official" styling for this topic (that's usually only for ~tildes.official topics) to make it stand out more to try to encourage people to notice it. My availability tomorrow will probably be limited, so if you notice people making individual topics for April Fools' Day things that don't really warrant their own topic, please (nicely) encourage them to delete and post in here instead.
Stack Overflow has gone for a more classical styling. Was strange to run into unexpected.
There will always be a piece of me that misses the internet looking (somewhat) like that. Flashy (literal or otherwise) ridiculousness, animated gifs, custom cursors/trails, and design cues taken from what you could do, not what you should do. I kind of miss the perpetual "in progress" vibe websites gave off in the 90s and early 00s.
Fret not, http://mess.be is still under construction!
hah, that got me thinking about my favorite AIM-related site and it still exists!! http://www.badassbuddy.com/
Check out Hypnospace Outlaw, it's been recently released and I'd say a very fun and charming experience; it should be right up your alley!
I see that SO—like The LibreSSL Project—are men of culture as well.
I love this, haha. Best April Fool's in a long time!
/r/csharp has an amazing redesign
This is one of the best arguments I have ever seen for unrestricted CSS in social media.
It's not really unrestricted.
No, it is not; indeed, a few CSS tags (inter alia
@font-faceIIRC) are not allowed in Reddit custom CSS.However, if compared with Abridged Style
SheetsSettings (ASS) offered by the Reddit redesigh, it looks unrestricted.Wow. Okay, this is hands down my favorite April Fool's today. This is fucking awesome!!! :D
Wayback Machine snapshot of this beautiful art
r/Games has closed the subreddit for the day on a more serious note.
Not in the spirit of April's Fools definitely, but I'm interested in the discussion it will start.
Jesus, they just want to make it harder for themselves, right? I mean, kudos, though!
It's a laudable sentiment done on the worst possible day in a pretentious manner.
I love what they are trying to do, but I'm really not a fan of how they did it.
I think this will need to be unpacked.
I've spoken to dozens of people, and many of them talk about how pretentious and self-aggrandizing the post was. Basically, a day that is dedicated to things being unserious and silly was taken and stood on its head so people could soapbox about something.
That's not to say that what they're saying is anything other than incredibly important - it is a message that needs to be spoken about at length - but I think it's not reading the audience at all (15 - 22 year old boys is the main demographic of Reddit). That demographic isn't suddenly going to take this seriously because one subreddit didn't do a joke.
Who are these dozens of people? Where? Because, for all I know, you talked to a bunch of people at r/pcgaming, who seemed to be trying their best to prove the mods' point. That's still not really much to dismiss the entire thing out of hand as "pretentious" though. In my experience, most uses of the criticism have no merit and it's just a shorthand for "I don't like it therefore it's bad".
And, frankly, this is the audience that actively tries to ignore its failings in these matters. Calling it out is the only medicine to such a tactic. What's the pretension to calling it out?
The people I've spoken to have been in various discords, reddit chats, hangouts, and slacks. I'm not going to list them all, but I think most of them are like-minded individuals to me; the sort of person who approves of the message and supports it.
Dismissing "pretentious" as "I don't like it therefore it's bad" is sloppy and unbecoming. I love this message; I think it's of utmost importance. I think this is not a day to be trying to make this message heard.
So calling it out on a joke day is going to help, or is it going to reinforce to the 15-22 year old boys that peruse the subreddit that this is a joke?
But if you claim something is pretentious, and I still don't see what the pretentiousness is about... is it a good summation of issues? That's what I mean about calling something "pretentious" as a form of criticism—it's really lost so much of its meaning that any "effortpost" could be called that, deserving or not.
And I get that it seems kinda backwards to do this on April Fools but it's as much of a good day as it is a bad one: lots of traffic, almost no real news, and the subreddit always ends up loathing April Fools by lunchtime. Shutting it down for the day isn't going to impact any real news or discussion, and it does cut down on a lot of the negativity that the subreddit gets every April Fools.
I hate just linking to dictionaries, but sometimes people disagree about terms: pretentious: 1. making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction. 2. intended to attract notice and impress others
I think that both of these definitions are applicable here. r/Games mods have made a claim to or created an appearance of (deserved) importance or distinction in this matter. They have also intended to attract notice and impress others with their actions.
I agree with what you've listed as reasons for "pros" but I think the "con" is that the people that need to take this seriously aren't going to as a result of today, and that the people who already take this matter seriously already take this matter seriously so doing something like a subreddit shutdown on a useless day doesn't accomplish anything.
If this is important enough to do, then it's important enough to do it on a day where it matters. Make a statement during PAX or some other Expo. Shut things down when people want to talk for real and not just talk shit about things.
That definition why I think it's a pointless criticism. It's such a broadly-defined term that it's rendered basically useless in any nuanced discussion. Yes, this post about bringing something to attention is intended to attract notice. Is it really insightful to point it out? Those definitions can be applied to any announcement or notice at all, so what's the point of summarizing something as pretentious? Like, what am I supposed to glean out of that as a statement about something beyond that there's an air of importance to it? Unless you're suggesting in other words that they're being performative (definition 1), I don't know what you're hoping to communicate by calling it pretentious and walking away is.
Sorry if I sound a little upset about words, I have strong feelings on words.
I really don't think when they shut it down is all that important, only the why. This would have had the exact same reaction on any other day, only with the complaints adjusted for whatever the event was e.g. "Why do this for PAX? PAX supports those causes, this is unfair!" This is also the tactic that many of the comment sections regarding minorities, LGBT issues, or diversity take. They will frequently find any excuse to shut down conversations about it, and saying "this isn't a good time" seems to be more of that. It will never be a good time. It's the same concept as any protest. It's not supposed to be convenient, it's supposed to be effective. And this has been pretty effective at getting attention so far.
There is no day that would be convenient for a subreddit full of people who suppress discussions about these topics to bring them to light. It will always be "not the right time".
As do I. I chose mine carefully. With respect to the word chosen: what I mean is that I found this pretentious. I know what the word means, and so do you. It's okay if you don't find it pretentious, but many people that I spoke to found it to be so; if that's the case, then maybe we should just stop and consider that perhaps if that is the takeaway from some people (notably people who are proponents of the issues here) that maybe this was not done as well as it could have been. This should not be offputting to any of the people who are clearly supporters of the message.
I think we simply disagree here. When you do something sends a message. For example, I wouldn't choose the first day of Black History Month to run a message like this; that day is earmarked for other things.
Not from me. There are many days where this sort of thing would not just be supported by me, but even cross posted and promoted in whatever way I could. For posterity, it may be relevant that I run a relatively large gaming subreddit (~1M subscribers, more than half the subscribers of r/Games) that has zero tolerance for any racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or any kind of hatred or intolerance based on intrinsic qualities of people; I am superlatively in favour of the message they are trying to send.
You just made an argument that today was actually a convenient day by merit of the fact that it was April Fools'. I don't think it's particularly fair to try to have it both ways.
Is it not the best possible day? They stand out from the rest of the subreddits like this, and get a ton of attention - and that kind of attention is sorely needed for the issues stated in the r/games thread. Or do the same problems not arise on r/wow? To a lesser degree of course.
Also, apologies; I mostly ignored the fact that you alluded to me moderating r/wow, which is maybe a disservice to your point. As with moderators of r/Games, I could easily create a similar set of screenshots. It could be the same size as the album they shared, and as with their subreddit, it would merely scratch the surface of the awful shit that we see day to day. The message that we will not allow this sort of behaviour is intensely important.
I think that by headlining this on a day of jokes, it undercuts the desired message.
I know a lot of people disagree with my take on this, so I'm reconsidering, but my gut tells me that this is not accomplishing much good. I think it's obvious that the people for whom this is intended do not respect the fact that this closure happened, and for them it is merely part of a the joke that is April Fools' Day.
That said, I don't have any good idea for how to reach the people that need to read and understand this that isn't an invasion of privacy that most people would find horrific.
No, I think you're still on the right track, that this is at its core a fine message but with poor-to-counterproductive delivery.
Further downthread in a discussion I had with another user, the point was made that the root issue is perhaps less about "x behavior is/should-be unacceptable" and more that "y behavior/topic is/must-be acceptable", and framing the discussion in those terms is more likely to be productive.
Everyone (the vast majority worth talking about, anyway) already largely agrees that "x is unacceptable", but there's a more useful conversation to be had about "how can we encourage/integrate constructive discussion of y?"
No. Some people are still taking it as if it was a joke (obviously only people who didn't read the whole thing, but if anyone thinks this is a joke, it's too many). Doing something serious on a day that is dedicated to not being in any way serious is, in my opinion, a mistake.
The same problems occur everywhere. They are important issues that we should talk about. However, how and when we go about saying things is important. I wouldn't any post trying to announce something serious on a day like today, because there will always be a subsection of the population who thinks that it's a joke. The people who think this is a joke already are the ones who aren't going to read and understand this message.
Google Maps has added a version of Snake: https://www.blog.google/products/maps/sssnakes-map/
It's playable through the Android and iOS apps, and there's also a standalone site: https://snake.googlemaps.com/
Also from Google: Screen Cleaner in the Files App and Google Tulip.
The explanation for the Screen Cleaner is so plausible that it makes me wonder why it can't be a real product!
XKCD is running the "Emojidome", which is basically just a huge voting contest between emoji.
Ah that's what broke the mastodon bot
A new competitor has entered the CPU market.
Mozilla's April Fool's prank was getting bought by Microsoft.
Microsoft should put a page there that redirects to Edge or something, lol.
Psyonix (makers of Rocket League) got reddit's Shitty_Watercolour to do something for them.
https://i.redd.it/77k9fiaymjp21.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/b7umtn/well_then/
He's clearly a fan of the game and has been doing comics about it for quite some time too:
https://i.redd.it/bdj6pp2a8pmz.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/70xmy6/me_rl/
https://i.redd.it/6mj8wc1roupz.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/749t5r/introducing_a_friend_to_rocket_league/
And last year they even added a banner he drew to the game, too:
https://i.imgur.com/73m2aPr.jpg
Well /r/europe is actually having fun: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/b7tjyk/the_house_of_commons_asserts_itself_over_reurope/
Other than that I'm actually hoping last year's trend of repurposing AF for more serious causes and what not continues. I'm not normally a killjoy… hell I don't take anything seriously. But AF is far too often markety, gimmicky and lame. It's the internet holiday embodiment of the Fellow Kids meme.
I don't mind when people put up an easter egg, or do a genuine fun gimmick (The Place comes to mind, that was pretty incredible). On all my sites I usually use AF as an occasion to do something nice for the users, such as making the paid service free for the day.
I read that as "repurposing As Fuck", as in the memetic phrase, and thought you meant "kicking the hell out of using the new April's-Fool-serious-tone messages".
/r/AskAnAmerican's also getting in on the act!
Spotify has changed its "discover weekly" into "discocover weekly". Right now I'm listening to a disco cover of "Rhapsody In Blue". :)
MetaFilter has created a Crouton Garden. You can generate your own crouton here:
https://www.metafilter.com/croutons/
This is a reference to the phrase "crouton-petter", which is shorthand for a person who gets very attached to inanimate objects (i.e., they would pet a crouton if they thought it might be, uh, "sad").
Reddit hasn't revealed their April Fools' event yet, but they've been posting some hints on their other social media accounts and people have been doing some investigation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/sequence_meta/
Thanks, edited.
Discord has a changlog that says they've deleted the light theme. I'm currently checking to see if it's possible to enable it...
They had te re-enable it after public outcry about it's impact on accessibility options. Turns out the prank wasn't very well thought through and seems to have been largely impulsive.
And I agree with the people grilling them for it: this is kind of shitty prank because it interferes with the ability of thousands of people to use the service.
And the same exact argument is why every app needs a similar dark mode. I immediately thought "accessibility" when I read Silbern's comment and I'm not surprised that it was reverted. Accessibility is hard, not because of the technology involved, but because of the empathy involved.
Yeah, I'm photosensitive and light themes give me headaches.
Sadly its still working for me. Would've been better if they would've actaully disabled it for the day
According to some, Tildes.net considers changing its logo
I, for one, embrace my rainbow cat overlord.
I think /r/diablo has one of the best subreddit CSS pranks of all time.
I really don't like pranks that interfere with the usage of websites. That page is really hard to read and navigate.
Well, there's no information of value there anyways, because the (current) game is dead, and the upcoming game is a mobile disaster that is already almost universally despised by the userbase of the subreddit.
It's also pretty good CSS that fully supports CTRL + for size increasing.
I'll never forget the stupid periwinkle vs orangered thing reddit did that made the entire site unusable.
turning off subreddit styling is pretty trivial.
Try on mobile without RES.
Okay, that is pretty cool. Trying to read it on an Epic 4G is basically impossible though. :P But still really neat!
It looks like they put it back already, but I found Devuan's April's fool to be quite amusing - they replaced their homepage with the ASCII-art logo of a "green hat hackers group", with some text on the side going
Others found it less amusing, and thought that the Devuan website got actually hacked.
The gopherholes, BTW, are still online - if you don't have a gopher client, just do
printf "\n" | nc www.devuan.org 70 | sed 's/.\([^\t]*\).*/\1/g'to check it out.As someone who loves Fallout 4 (and to a lesser extent, FO76), I think I'll go enjoy a NV-free /r/fallout for a day.
There's a pull request on the OCaml repo to add three
nulltypes, in order to make it more popular. It's a pretty airtight argument.So, last year the unofficial Dota 2 community manager posted about an "update" to the game which included real-time suggestions for user actions (which is funny) and automated play by the AI assistant (which is ridiculous).
This yeah, they did a cosmetic change.
For context: Silencer has the ability to permanently steal Intelligence (an in-game stat) from the enemy heroes that die in his vicinity. Someone posted the suggestion a few days ago on /r/Dota2. The second hero portrayed, Undying, temporarily steals Strength.
Both announcements have a "video preview", which is... well, it's the first of April. Can you guess which unusually-deeply-voiced young man is dancing and singing on the other end of the link?
I currently have very slow and only mobile internet. What young man do you mean? And is he relevant to Dota only?
https://i.imgur.com/uSy0Ugj.png
It's a rickroll. Ricky don't like Europe.
O_o
How the fuck did that happen?
Heard that Europe banned the memes and realized that ye ole rickroll is quite the meme? I don't know.
The Russian Wikipedia has switched its main page into pre-1918 orthography. You can notice that by how they use outdated Cyrillic letters, like “ѣ” and “і” (which is technically not outdated in Belarusian and Ukrainian).
<title>still the same, though.Discord turned off light-mode and then turned it back on after the community got mad: https://redd.it/b7xddc
This is why the 'Post a comment' box is at the bottom of all threads:
https://tildes.net/~misc/by4/megathread_april_fools_day_2019_on_the_internet#comment-2y7s
Then again a lot of people will just zoom past and not read anything, just-woke-up me included. :/
eh, I guess I missed it. I was reading, refreshed the comments, then read again and it must have collapsed it
Bon Appétit is "pivoting to ASMR food videos."
They've been making some ASMR jokes in the last few videos with Brad in them. I couldn't be arsed watching the whole 30min video today though.
Philosophy Tube has made a Jordan Peterson inspired parody analysis of anime. The Philosophy Of Anime
Linus Tech Tips liquid cooled a PC with concrete mix to surprising results.
/r/TheNetherlands does caveman speech posts and comments, and they remove non-conforming posts which is highly annoying :|
deviantArt has a new product; khush, allowing you to diffuse and smell all that sweet, sweet arts.
Parkbus, a service that takes residents of the big city to provincial parks, has a new plan to return wild animals to the city.
Jstris added huge blocks
I hope they keep/fix it as a mode, it's one of my favorite things to do in NullPomino.
Surprised no one has mentioned whats going on over at https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets
They're promising to mod anyone who comments in this thread and promising full permissions if they manage to hit #1 on /r/all.
I'm honestly wondering if the mods are just done with the sub and want to see it go out in a fun way. Either way, I participated just because I want to see what happens.
Once again, ThinkGeek creates an April Fool's product which I would absolutely buy.
The Pepper&Carrot webcomic replaced the cat "Carrot" with a dog named "Beetroot".
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article711/production-report-pepperbeetroot-the-dog-refactor
Void Linux has updated their homepage.
EDIT: It's been reverted now; you can visit a snapshot of it here.
Corsair announced a game launcher launcher on Twitter. Gotta love how they support uTorrent and Limewire!
I'm on vacation so everyone been talking about April fools for like a quarter of the day, while for me it's still March
Are you on vacation on one of those uninhabited Pacific islands? It's 16:20 here, and I'm quite up there, timezone-wise.
I'm just on maui, but I wake up late and got to bed late
Hey dude! Writing this from Oahu, I'm at UH Manoa at the moment. Definitely feel you, we're always those couple hours behind the mainland, which makes these kinds of days feel out of place. The Europeans are already taking their April Fool's down, and it's only noon!