[insert beloved celebrity] has died after smoking fent while having an IBS attack
More like [insert beloved celebrity] who's like 70-80 anyway died from natural causes.
It's not creative or goofy or a little suspicious on the face of it, it's just a fake story played straight. The only joke is "you idiot, you fool, for a second you believed this plausible story no one has any reason to make up!"
i don't like the idea of any kind of space built on pure irony/sarcasm because it always devolves into earnestness by people who don't catch the joke, or people who want to hide something insidious within the irony
maybe our beautiful mods could have handled it before it got too out of control, but I'm still just not into it
i don't like the idea of any kind of space built on pure irony/sarcasm because it always devolves into earnestness by people who don't catch the joke
Idk if that's totally true, I've seen ironic spaces that manage to keep things under control, the main factors seem to be if the community was founded by people who were genuinely there for ironic play or by people looking to hide their actual opinions, and if the mod team is vigilant in chasing off people who show up who clearly aren't there for the humor.
We will reform the Anti Union comm, and a bot will post long winded pro union theory and a debate on the nature of comedy automatically under every comment
We can discuss it after you stop dealing fent. How many clientele of yours have OD'ed again because you keep listening to discord podcasts while cutting your product?
I've had that comm blocked since the day it was created and both its posters blocked since before it was created. Honestly baffling to me that they haven't been permabanned yet. You're not even exaggerating when you say least funny people, and they're also among the most toxic.
I too am upset. I just found it before i went to sleep and made a really bad post there. I dont even get to see if anyone thought it was worth an up bear.
I'll defend fakenew' right to exist although I'll agree it's general not that funny. I have gotten spoofed and befuddled on a couple occasions before checking the name of the comm and I enjoy getting got from time to time, the rest of the time it's clearly fake and mid at best. But whatever, no harm is being done.
It's often not, though. It had a post announcing that Danny Devito got cancer -- nothing about that is absurd or unbelievable or ironic on its face. It's non-satire where the only joke is lying to you and then laughing if you don't immediately call bullshit on a plausible story played straight.
I think that the fake Danny Devito death is a funny joke and I'll explain why.
Hexbear has a culture. Hexbear has it's own memes and references and stuff like that. The fakenews comm uses references and memes from Hexbear culture to create a story, an alternative world.
One meme on Hexbear that I've seen is like the idolization of Italian people or the Italian mafia. I believe this meme stems from Chris Cuomo in 2019 saying that "fredo" was a slur for Italians equivalent to the n-word. This is like obviously an absurd thing for Cuomo to say and chapo made fun of him for it. Then a meme sort of developed that "Italians are the most oppressed race" meme, making fun of Cuomo and other white people. Hextube started watching a lot of mafia movies and hextube made a bunch of mafia emotes exclusive to hextube. Danny Devito is partly of Italian descent and he has acted in more than one Mafia movie.
Another element is that Danny Devito is perceived as a left-leaning guy. Danny Devito campaigned for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and in 2020. Danny Devito is a beloved figure in general. Reddit loves Danny Devito. Chapos love Danny Devito. You probably love Danny Devito, which is why you are upset about a fake story.
The third element is Melina. Melina also loves Danny Devito. Danny Devito plays Frank on Always Sunny. Melina is a super fan of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, even watches their podcast as well as the show.
In my opinion, humor is a subversion of expectations. You expect one thing to happen, but then something else happens, and the surprise that you experience causes you to laugh. I've established that Danny Devito is a beloved figure and that Melina loves Danny Devito. The expectation for me is that Melina would create a fakenews post which idolizes Danny Devito. The real outcome is that Melina creates a fakenews post which kills Danny Devito. Melina kills their own hero in fantasy. I think that is funny.
For whom the sidebar of that comm tolls. (I find it mildly amusing tbh, but didn't we have stealth tech for comms? or was that lost when we got to lemmy)
I liked the anti union comm (understanding that it was never going to last longer than a week) because it was pretty obvious sarcasm. I don't like the fakenews comm because it tricked me once or twice and that's not fair.
e: i take it all back /c/fakenews is mod posts only. fake news should be democratically controlled by a poster's soviet, not this bureaucratic betrayal of the revolution. down with /c/fakenews
I like it and I also think it's a good reminder that not all fake news on the internet is labelled as such and I need to stay aware while browsing online lest I absorb lies as fact.