9 ms·

Laughter Doesn’t Scale

132 points by joshwa 11y ago

exolymph 11y ago
If you're interesting in this garbage fire, I recommend reading Andy Baio's whole Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715747304444002304 https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715747304444002304
- Grue3 11y ago
  This seems hilarious to me, sounds like an outcome of a good prank. Why exactly does Google need to apologize to these users? What are they gonna do, switch to Hotmail? When you're as big as Google, you can completely shut down entire services like Google Reader and get away with it.
  - cauterized 11y ago
    Maybe they don't need to apologize to the users tweeting at them. But maybe you heard about people who, for instance, got fired because they hit this accidentally?
    - whitegrape 11y ago
      If it actually happened, that's both pretty hilarious and sad for all parties involved. The unintentional fallout has been much more amusing to witness than the actual gimmick of putting a Minion in everyone's email. I can't get on board the tear train of "victimized by technology, technology maker should make amends!" when the impact of victimization is so small, even the "lost my job because technology maker and especially my boss are retarded" is pretty low-impact. I generally have the attitude of "Sucks, but get on with life" to a lot of things, though.
    - grahamburger 11y ago
      I can't possibly imagine someone being fired for this, it would be so easy to explain away. It was very literally in every sense of the word not the fault of the sender. I guess if you were already in the habit of sending nasty emails and then send this it could break the camel's back. Otherwise if this got someone fired I'd say the lion's share of the blame goes to the person doing the firing, with just a tiny portion going back to Google.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      > But maybe you heard about people who, for instance, got fired because they hit this accidentally? Yeah, I'm waiting for Snopes to weigh in on that one.
    - djrogers 11y ago
      > maybe you heard about people who, for instance, got fired because they hit this accidentally? I would be willing to wager large sums of money that this didn't happen, and even larger sums that if it did, it was resolved in about 18 seconds, and the person is still employed come Monday (with a good laugh to share with coworkers).
      - CamperBob2 11y ago
        Even with at-will employment in the US, when someone gets fired it often comes at the end of a lengthy and combative process. Picking up the last straw may not bring the proverbial camel back to life, if your manager was already looking for an excuse to get rid of you.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    Yes, and that's emblematic of a significant power imbalance between the service provider and its users. If you use GMail or any of their other services, you're just one hundreds of millions of sharecroppers on Google's plantation. One of the attributes of a good harmless practical joke is that it doesn't call attention to deeper, unsettling truths like that.
gexla 11y ago
Bad move on Google's part. But I would think by now people would be used to seeing media being inserted into a free service. If you want to get rid of the ads, get a paid service.
danso 11y ago
I think the bigger lesson is...don't mess with interfaces that a billion users have gotten accustomed to. Think of the massive outcry that happens on a redesign...With so many users, even a rarely used button like Send + Archive, is going to be used in thousands of ways that you do not anticipate. And I'm guessing a fairly innocuous feature change did not go through many levels of QA testing before they rolled it out on April 1
- deleted 11y ago
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- dkersten 11y ago
  Don't mess with interfaces that a billion users rely on.
mcguire 11y ago
"There is no science behind this chart, but we’re consultants." And they say humor doesn't scale.
Apocryphon 11y ago
Between Gmail being announced an April 1st, and Apple being founded on another, maybe the best way to celebrate this day is with the truth.
skybrian 11y ago
Laughter is an all clear signal indicating that something looks weird but is actually harmless. If someone doesn't think you're funny, maybe they don't trust you enough to think you're harmless. Strangers are always going to require more convincing than friends.
- gohrt 11y ago
  Exactly. Humor requires context, and context doesn't scale easily.
minimaxir 11y ago
It is entirely possible to be comedic in tech. But the risks outweigh the benefits, unless you have a strong comedic background and a very strong understanding of your audience and context. "My friends laughed at it!" is a common standard for tech humor nowadays. It's highly misleading especially if you are a part of the echo chamber.
- girvo 11y ago
  Agreed. As an example, the Pinboard dev (idlewords?) is quite hilarious in a dry, caustic but extremely cheerful way. I could never be as funny as they are, it's just not part of my skill set!
- Retra 11y ago
  The bigger your audience, the less you understand them, and the more likely your joke will flop.
blakeyrat 11y ago
The problem isn't that it's a joke. The problem is that Google didn't do any kind of UX thinking behind the change. (It doesn't matter whether the change is serious or a joke, you can't just ignore the user experience.) The new button performed a destructive action (because it blocked the recipient from responding to the email thread) without any kind of confirmation. Additionally, it was placed where it was likely to be hit by accident. (Apparently where the "Send & Archive" button used to be, although I don't have that on my Gmail theme.) In short, they didn't test the damned thing. Even a half-hour of user-testing would have shown how easily the button was pressed by accident, and how devastating an accidental press was. And again: it doesn't matter if the change is a joke or not, you don't push up a change unless you've done some basic UX work on it.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  >>The problem isn't that it's a joke. The problem is that Google didn't do any kind of UX thinking behind the change. Actually no, the problem is that the joke they came up with is the type that requires UX testing in the first place, i.e. it changes the behavior of a product in a very noticeable and non-reversible (by the user) way. As opposed to something harmless, like a joke announcement or something. Several years ago Blizzard announced the "Archivist" class for their popular game, Diablo 3. They put a good amount of effort into the joke, with a short gameplay video and everything. But it was a joke, and the class didn't actually make it into the game, and everyone had fun.
- shogun21 11y ago
  Good UX is every action should be reversible. And have confirmations before any destructive behavior. However, that completely goes against the point of this joke. It's not a prank if they prompted, "Are you sure you want to send a Minion gif and mute yourself from this conversation?"
  - erikpukinskis 11y ago
    How does a confirmation go against the point?
amelius 11y ago
Does anybody know of a book containing a good analysis of humor? I'm wondering if there is some structure to be found in the things we find funny.
- draw_down 11y ago
  "Comedy by the Numbers" http://www.amazon.com/Comedy-Numbers-Secrets-Humor-Popularity/dp/1932416757 http://www.amazon.com/Comedy-Numbers-Secrets-Humor-Popularit...
- js8 11y ago
  Not sure if it's what you're asking for, but I found http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Jokes-Using-Humor-Reverse-Engineer/dp/0262518694 http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Jokes-Using-Humor-Reverse-Engin... interesting.
jmduke 11y ago
I've been reading Design for Real Life (https://abookapart.com/products/design-for-real-life https://abookapart.com/products/design-for-real-life), and its introduction is a fairly similar mirror of this kind of snafu -- using Facebook's "Your Year in Moments" feature as a stand-in. When Facebook first launched it, they positioned it as a "look at all the awesome things that happened this year!" sort of feature, with lots of smiling faces and positive, upbeat language. However, the reality often didn't match up -- Facebook would add sad or otherwise unideal photos/statuses to the collage, such as houses burning down, depictions of illness, etc. etc. Lots of users complained, and as a result they shifted the tone of the feature to be more neutral. ("We thought you might like to take a look back at the past year") Put another way: edge cases (or as the book refers to them, stress cases) exist not just in code paths but in your user's expectations and emotions. Just as a good architecture can handle these appropriately, a good design and UX accounts for the entire spectrum of users.
- mgkimsal 11y ago
  What's so odd about that is it's literally trivial to see that trainwreck well in advance. Maybe not if the entirety of your internal culture caters to sub 35 years old.
  - jmduke 11y ago
    The willful ignorance of the assumption that everyone using your product is a happy, well-off individual with no sad/traumatic events in recent history is akin to the willful ignorance that nobody will try passing in a negative number to a method which takes an integer as an argument.
jkot 11y ago
Some jokes are not scalable. Funny cats on youtube are scalable.
kuschku 11y ago
A joke should be simple, globally understandable – and if it isn’t understandable, shouldn’t be too annoying – and it should never be destructive. Changing GMail to render (but not send!) all emails in Comic Sans would be such a change. (With a notification at top to turn it off) Offering "Clippy" now also in Hotmail would be such a change. (with the ability to hide it) Adding a "Send (and attach a gif that makes me seem like an idiot, and nuke the conversation)" button where a normal send button used to be is not. A good joke is hard, and we all have made jokes that backfired before. But for a corporation, such as Google, in a huge project of theirs, they should try to double and triple check each joke for damage it might do.
- lotharbot 11y ago
  > "it should never be destructive" it's particularly important to account for psychological or social destructiveness. Rickrolling someone can be funny. Pretending that you're pregnant and then saying "April Fools" later in the day can be psychologically harmful to those who struggle with infertility or who have lost a child. Replacing someone's PC startup sound with flatulence can be hilarious. Posting a fake, mean story about someone else can prompt others to pile on thinking that you're serious, and damage a relationship. Rendering all webpages in Comic Sans is worth a chuckle. Nuking someone's e-mail conversation can cost people their jobs, or at the very least can result in important (business-critical or even life-critical) information getting lost in the shuffle. This joke could have been funny, if it had been carefully tailored to be non-dangerous and non-destructive. It wasn't.
aantix 11y ago
Laughter definitely scales, it's just not infinitely scalable.. The Onion scales. It doesn't scale past the Generation X audience, but oh, it scales.
- paganel 11y ago
  I'd say great comedy actors like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy have scaled very well, both in terms of timespan (the first Charlie Chaplin short films are now more than a century old) and distance, as they all became famous all over the world. I'd add Tex Avery's cartoon characters to this list. So I'd say in the above mentioned cases laughter did become "infinitely scalable". But then again, the guys and girls at Google who came up with this stupid idea are no comedic geniuses.
- coldtea 11y ago
  You'd be amazed at how many of the "Generation X" have taken the Onion for real, or stand for the exactly inverse ideals. It's like people think every 20 something in the sixties was progressive, but there were tens of millions of conservative kids that grew up into conservative adults...
  - gohrt 11y ago
    What are Onion's ideals?
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Well, let's say (hard to put in precise words as not an American), but even if it mocks Democrats almost equally, it's certainly no pro-GOP, and in fact anti-Republican. It also obviously stands against everything Bible-belt -- which pines it against a good 30-50 million Americans who stand for those things (even if they don't live in the Belt). In general, it has the same kind of general progressive ideals you'd expect from such a comedic outlet, and even if it makes heavy fun of american society, it can't escape the american viewpoint on the world (e.g it's P.C. in essence, even while making fun of P.C.-isms, it shares the "success is everything" mindset in mocking the middle and "white trash" class that's prevalent everywhere, seldom questions us views of foreign countries and core foreign policy "facts" -- except for rooting for the doves in the the hawks vs doves internal us discussion, etc.).
draw_down 11y ago
Everyone should just stop this shit. I too enjoyed these things years ago, but not anymore. There are too many now, but it also seems a bit sneakier or more malicious now than it used to, the Gmail thing is a great example. And it just seems de rigeur rather than fun or funny.
deleted 11y ago
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tigershark 11y ago
I can't imagine the overall impact, I guess that the child that pushed this "feature" is sweating a lot right now.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
grahamburger 11y ago
I'd say the popularity of sitcoms (in the US at least) proves that comedy scales pretty well as long as you don't stray from the formula. (Bump, set, spike!)
keyle 11y ago
That highlighted quote really nailed it deep for me. I've felt that network effect on twitter for many people.
studentrob 11y ago
Hmm. Laughter doesn't scale when you're not funny. Plenty of viral YouTube videos have shown that it sure as heck can scale. The problem with this button is fairly obvious in hindsight. Google injected humor into many people's business and personal worlds where it wasn't wanted or expected. This article is yet another apologist for what is clearly a lack of foresight by Google. By the way, I notice society explaining away a lot of behavior by others lately. People seem afraid to criticize products and other people these days. Let's call this what it is: a massive mistake. Google corrected it as soon as they realized it and apologized. We can move on.
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  If the stories of people missing out on job offers and so forth are true, Google did real damage to their lives and should make amends somehow. I'll freely grant that I don't know what, specifically, they should do, but "sorry lol" doesn't really cut it.
  - arghimonmobile 11y ago
    If I were one of those duped users, I'd expect a service subscription refund from Google. Or maybe a few months' service on the house. At least. /s
    - 13thLetter 11y ago
      Well, that's the interesting question, isn't it. Google offered a high quality service for free. (Well, "free" as in they're selling eyeballs to advertisers, but, you know. Internet free.) They aggressively promoted it to the entire world. Literally a billion people took them up on it and, after years of reliable service, have made it a central part of their professional and personal lives. What is Google's responsibility at this point to not grief those billion people? Whether by bad April Fool's pranks, or anything else? If the takeaway from your comment is that the world would be better if people paid for their email service, I wouldn't disagree. But how we get back to that point is not at all clear.
  - 11y ago
anotherevan 11y ago
For me, the best April Fools’ joke was when GitHub added SVN support[1]. It was funny, ironic, useful, and best of all, real. I always think of it as the April Fools’ joke that keeps on giving. [1] https://github.com/blog/626-announcing-svn-support https://github.com/blog/626-announcing-svn-support
Animats 11y ago
Was this Gail Harrison's doing?[1] She's Illumination Entertainment's head of marketing and branding. She would have had to sign off on this for Google to use a Minions™ character. Gail is a major figure in the branding industry. She was behind the branding of The Simpsons characters. She managed the Disney Princesses branding. Before her work, there were princesses in Disney films, but they hadn't been harnessed into a supergroup merchandising team, pulling over $3 billion a year in tie-in sales. "Mic drop" had to have her approval. [1] http://variety.com/2016/film/news/illumination-gail-harrison-marketing-branding-president-1201725127/ http://variety.com/2016/film/news/illumination-gail-harrison...
- aerovistae 11y ago
  This small profile of Gail Harrison seems largely irrelevant and reads like you're trying to hype her up to make some sort of a sell.
  - Animats 11y ago
    It's more about blame. Someone whose job implies a professional understanding of humor at scale signed off on this. How did that happen? A good question for the trades (Variety, THR) to take up.
    - Absentinsomniac 11y ago
      Maybe google just licensed or asked to use it as a part of an undefined April fools joke, and she / they assumed Google wouldn't do something irresponsible?
      - Animats 11y ago
        We don't know. But she should, and the trade magazines can ask her. Hollywood talks to the press.
    - newman8r 11y ago
      I don't think the prank hurts her brand - it may help it.
wodenokoto 11y ago
A typical Google April 1st joke is a product announcement (Google Japan hit the front page with theirs earlier) but this one is the opportunity for users to prank other users (and easily doing it by mistake) Since users are quite good at doing everything you don't want them to do, this create great opportunities for mistakes and abuse.
swiley 11y ago
This is why web apps are bad. (among other reasons) The UI can change for any reason without you knowing and with no way to stop it.
- sergiosgc 11y ago
  That is also why they are good. The UI will change and evolve and perfect, without you thinking about it. -- Glass half-full kind of guy.
  - swiley 11y ago
    Hahaha. I don't think I've ever used a single web app where the UI got better over time. Perhaps hn is the only exception.
CM30 11y ago
Laughter definitely scales. I mean, how many other tech companies did April Fools Day jokes yesterday? Tons of them, yet it's mostly Google that's getting the criticism for messing up here. Google's problem was this joke was forced on people, even when they weren't in a mood to make any jokes. If it was an optional button to the right, or activated by some other means that wasn't 'click a button that many people used, or sometimes have it wotk automatically', then people wouldn't be complaining about it.
gragas 11y ago
>and, sometimes, if you’re a woman, by a miscellany of invasive threats What the heck? I'm not a woman, so apparently no one can threaten me on the internet? Sure women probably receive far more internet threats, but we should use language to reflect that, rather than outright lying and trivializing all the instances where men were threatened.
- iopq 11y ago
  Actually, men receive just as many Internet threats, but they tend to ignore them, while women tend to take them seriously.

132 points by joshwa 11y ago

If you're interesting in this garbage fire, I recommend reading Andy Baio's whole Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715747304444002304 https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/715747304444002304

Grue3 11y ago
This seems hilarious to me, sounds like an outcome of a good prank. Why exactly does Google need to apologize to these users? What are they gonna do, switch to Hotmail? When you're as big as Google, you can completely shut down entire services like Google Reader and get away with it.
- cauterized 11y ago
  Maybe they don't need to apologize to the users tweeting at them. But maybe you heard about people who, for instance, got fired because they hit this accidentally?
  - whitegrape 11y ago
    If it actually happened, that's both pretty hilarious and sad for all parties involved. The unintentional fallout has been much more amusing to witness than the actual gimmick of putting a Minion in everyone's email. I can't get on board the tear train of "victimized by technology, technology maker should make amends!" when the impact of victimization is so small, even the "lost my job because technology maker and especially my boss are retarded" is pretty low-impact. I generally have the attitude of "Sucks, but get on with life" to a lot of things, though.
  - grahamburger 11y ago
    I can't possibly imagine someone being fired for this, it would be so easy to explain away. It was very literally in every sense of the word not the fault of the sender. I guess if you were already in the habit of sending nasty emails and then send this it could break the camel's back. Otherwise if this got someone fired I'd say the lion's share of the blame goes to the person doing the firing, with just a tiny portion going back to Google.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > But maybe you heard about people who, for instance, got fired because they hit this accidentally? Yeah, I'm waiting for Snopes to weigh in on that one.
  - djrogers 11y ago
    > maybe you heard about people who, for instance, got fired because they hit this accidentally? I would be willing to wager large sums of money that this didn't happen, and even larger sums that if it did, it was resolved in about 18 seconds, and the person is still employed come Monday (with a good laugh to share with coworkers).
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      Even with at-will employment in the US, when someone gets fired it often comes at the end of a lengthy and combative process. Picking up the last straw may not bring the proverbial camel back to life, if your manager was already looking for an excuse to get rid of you.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  Yes, and that's emblematic of a significant power imbalance between the service provider and its users. If you use GMail or any of their other services, you're just one hundreds of millions of sharecroppers on Google's plantation. One of the attributes of a good harmless practical joke is that it doesn't call attention to deeper, unsettling truths like that.

gexla 11y ago

Bad move on Google's part. But I would think by now people would be used to seeing media being inserted into a free service. If you want to get rid of the ads, get a paid service.

danso 11y ago

I think the bigger lesson is...don't mess with interfaces that a billion users have gotten accustomed to. Think of the massive outcry that happens on a redesign...With so many users, even a rarely used button like Send + Archive, is going to be used in thousands of ways that you do not anticipate. And I'm guessing a fairly innocuous feature change did not go through many levels of QA testing before they rolled it out on April 1

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dkersten 11y ago
Don't mess with interfaces that a billion users rely on.

mcguire 11y ago

"There is no science behind this chart, but we’re consultants." And they say humor doesn't scale.

Apocryphon 11y ago

Between Gmail being announced an April 1st, and Apple being founded on another, maybe the best way to celebrate this day is with the truth.

skybrian 11y ago

Laughter is an all clear signal indicating that something looks weird but is actually harmless. If someone doesn't think you're funny, maybe they don't trust you enough to think you're harmless. Strangers are always going to require more convincing than friends.

gohrt 11y ago
Exactly. Humor requires context, and context doesn't scale easily.

minimaxir 11y ago

It is entirely possible to be comedic in tech. But the risks outweigh the benefits, unless you have a strong comedic background and a very strong understanding of your audience and context. "My friends laughed at it!" is a common standard for tech humor nowadays. It's highly misleading especially if you are a part of the echo chamber.

girvo 11y ago
Agreed. As an example, the Pinboard dev (idlewords?) is quite hilarious in a dry, caustic but extremely cheerful way. I could never be as funny as they are, it's just not part of my skill set!
Retra 11y ago
The bigger your audience, the less you understand them, and the more likely your joke will flop.

blakeyrat 11y ago

The problem isn't that it's a joke. The problem is that Google didn't do any kind of UX thinking behind the change. (It doesn't matter whether the change is serious or a joke, you can't just ignore the user experience.) The new button performed a destructive action (because it blocked the recipient from responding to the email thread) without any kind of confirmation. Additionally, it was placed where it was likely to be hit by accident. (Apparently where the "Send & Archive" button used to be, although I don't have that on my Gmail theme.) In short, they didn't test the damned thing. Even a half-hour of user-testing would have shown how easily the button was pressed by accident, and how devastating an accidental press was. And again: it doesn't matter if the change is a joke or not, you don't push up a change unless you've done some basic UX work on it.

enraged_camel 11y ago
>>The problem isn't that it's a joke. The problem is that Google didn't do any kind of UX thinking behind the change. Actually no, the problem is that the joke they came up with is the type that requires UX testing in the first place, i.e. it changes the behavior of a product in a very noticeable and non-reversible (by the user) way. As opposed to something harmless, like a joke announcement or something. Several years ago Blizzard announced the "Archivist" class for their popular game, Diablo 3. They put a good amount of effort into the joke, with a short gameplay video and everything. But it was a joke, and the class didn't actually make it into the game, and everyone had fun.
shogun21 11y ago
Good UX is every action should be reversible. And have confirmations before any destructive behavior. However, that completely goes against the point of this joke. It's not a prank if they prompted, "Are you sure you want to send a Minion gif and mute yourself from this conversation?"
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  How does a confirmation go against the point?

amelius 11y ago

Does anybody know of a book containing a good analysis of humor? I'm wondering if there is some structure to be found in the things we find funny.

draw_down 11y ago
"Comedy by the Numbers" http://www.amazon.com/Comedy-Numbers-Secrets-Humor-Popularity/dp/1932416757 http://www.amazon.com/Comedy-Numbers-Secrets-Humor-Popularit...
js8 11y ago
Not sure if it's what you're asking for, but I found http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Jokes-Using-Humor-Reverse-Engineer/dp/0262518694 http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Jokes-Using-Humor-Reverse-Engin... interesting.

jmduke 11y ago

I've been reading Design for Real Life (https://abookapart.com/products/design-for-real-life https://abookapart.com/products/design-for-real-life), and its introduction is a fairly similar mirror of this kind of snafu -- using Facebook's "Your Year in Moments" feature as a stand-in. When Facebook first launched it, they positioned it as a "look at all the awesome things that happened this year!" sort of feature, with lots of smiling faces and positive, upbeat language. However, the reality often didn't match up -- Facebook would add sad or otherwise unideal photos/statuses to the collage, such as houses burning down, depictions of illness, etc. etc. Lots of users complained, and as a result they shifted the tone of the feature to be more neutral. ("We thought you might like to take a look back at the past year") Put another way: edge cases (or as the book refers to them, stress cases) exist not just in code paths but in your user's expectations and emotions. Just as a good architecture can handle these appropriately, a good design and UX accounts for the entire spectrum of users.

mgkimsal 11y ago
What's so odd about that is it's literally trivial to see that trainwreck well in advance. Maybe not if the entirety of your internal culture caters to sub 35 years old.
- jmduke 11y ago
  The willful ignorance of the assumption that everyone using your product is a happy, well-off individual with no sad/traumatic events in recent history is akin to the willful ignorance that nobody will try passing in a negative number to a method which takes an integer as an argument.

jkot 11y ago

Some jokes are not scalable. Funny cats on youtube are scalable.

kuschku 11y ago

A joke should be simple, globally understandable – and if it isn’t understandable, shouldn’t be too annoying – and it should never be destructive. Changing GMail to render (but not send!) all emails in Comic Sans would be such a change. (With a notification at top to turn it off) Offering "Clippy" now also in Hotmail would be such a change. (with the ability to hide it) Adding a "Send (and attach a gif that makes me seem like an idiot, and nuke the conversation)" button where a normal send button used to be is not. A good joke is hard, and we all have made jokes that backfired before. But for a corporation, such as Google, in a huge project of theirs, they should try to double and triple check each joke for damage it might do.

lotharbot 11y ago
> "it should never be destructive" it's particularly important to account for psychological or social destructiveness. Rickrolling someone can be funny. Pretending that you're pregnant and then saying "April Fools" later in the day can be psychologically harmful to those who struggle with infertility or who have lost a child. Replacing someone's PC startup sound with flatulence can be hilarious. Posting a fake, mean story about someone else can prompt others to pile on thinking that you're serious, and damage a relationship. Rendering all webpages in Comic Sans is worth a chuckle. Nuking someone's e-mail conversation can cost people their jobs, or at the very least can result in important (business-critical or even life-critical) information getting lost in the shuffle. This joke could have been funny, if it had been carefully tailored to be non-dangerous and non-destructive. It wasn't.

aantix 11y ago

Laughter definitely scales, it's just not infinitely scalable.. The Onion scales. It doesn't scale past the Generation X audience, but oh, it scales.

paganel 11y ago
I'd say great comedy actors like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy have scaled very well, both in terms of timespan (the first Charlie Chaplin short films are now more than a century old) and distance, as they all became famous all over the world. I'd add Tex Avery's cartoon characters to this list. So I'd say in the above mentioned cases laughter did become "infinitely scalable". But then again, the guys and girls at Google who came up with this stupid idea are no comedic geniuses.
coldtea 11y ago
You'd be amazed at how many of the "Generation X" have taken the Onion for real, or stand for the exactly inverse ideals. It's like people think every 20 something in the sixties was progressive, but there were tens of millions of conservative kids that grew up into conservative adults...
- gohrt 11y ago
  What are Onion's ideals?
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Well, let's say (hard to put in precise words as not an American), but even if it mocks Democrats almost equally, it's certainly no pro-GOP, and in fact anti-Republican. It also obviously stands against everything Bible-belt -- which pines it against a good 30-50 million Americans who stand for those things (even if they don't live in the Belt). In general, it has the same kind of general progressive ideals you'd expect from such a comedic outlet, and even if it makes heavy fun of american society, it can't escape the american viewpoint on the world (e.g it's P.C. in essence, even while making fun of P.C.-isms, it shares the "success is everything" mindset in mocking the middle and "white trash" class that's prevalent everywhere, seldom questions us views of foreign countries and core foreign policy "facts" -- except for rooting for the doves in the the hawks vs doves internal us discussion, etc.).

draw_down 11y ago

Everyone should just stop this shit. I too enjoyed these things years ago, but not anymore. There are too many now, but it also seems a bit sneakier or more malicious now than it used to, the Gmail thing is a great example. And it just seems de rigeur rather than fun or funny.

deleted 11y ago

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tigershark 11y ago

I can't imagine the overall impact, I guess that the child that pushed this "feature" is sweating a lot right now.

deleted 11y ago
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grahamburger 11y ago

I'd say the popularity of sitcoms (in the US at least) proves that comedy scales pretty well as long as you don't stray from the formula. (Bump, set, spike!)

keyle 11y ago

That highlighted quote really nailed it deep for me. I've felt that network effect on twitter for many people.

studentrob 11y ago

Hmm. Laughter doesn't scale when you're not funny. Plenty of viral YouTube videos have shown that it sure as heck can scale. The problem with this button is fairly obvious in hindsight. Google injected humor into many people's business and personal worlds where it wasn't wanted or expected. This article is yet another apologist for what is clearly a lack of foresight by Google. By the way, I notice society explaining away a lot of behavior by others lately. People seem afraid to criticize products and other people these days. Let's call this what it is: a massive mistake. Google corrected it as soon as they realized it and apologized. We can move on.

13thLetter 11y ago
If the stories of people missing out on job offers and so forth are true, Google did real damage to their lives and should make amends somehow. I'll freely grant that I don't know what, specifically, they should do, but "sorry lol" doesn't really cut it.
- arghimonmobile 11y ago
  If I were one of those duped users, I'd expect a service subscription refund from Google. Or maybe a few months' service on the house. At least. /s
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    Well, that's the interesting question, isn't it. Google offered a high quality service for free. (Well, "free" as in they're selling eyeballs to advertisers, but, you know. Internet free.) They aggressively promoted it to the entire world. Literally a billion people took them up on it and, after years of reliable service, have made it a central part of their professional and personal lives. What is Google's responsibility at this point to not grief those billion people? Whether by bad April Fool's pranks, or anything else? If the takeaway from your comment is that the world would be better if people paid for their email service, I wouldn't disagree. But how we get back to that point is not at all clear.
- 11y ago

anotherevan 11y ago

For me, the best April Fools’ joke was when GitHub added SVN support[1]. It was funny, ironic, useful, and best of all, real. I always think of it as the April Fools’ joke that keeps on giving. [1] https://github.com/blog/626-announcing-svn-support https://github.com/blog/626-announcing-svn-support

Animats 11y ago

Was this Gail Harrison's doing?[1] She's Illumination Entertainment's head of marketing and branding. She would have had to sign off on this for Google to use a Minions™ character. Gail is a major figure in the branding industry. She was behind the branding of The Simpsons characters. She managed the Disney Princesses branding. Before her work, there were princesses in Disney films, but they hadn't been harnessed into a supergroup merchandising team, pulling over $3 billion a year in tie-in sales. "Mic drop" had to have her approval. [1] http://variety.com/2016/film/news/illumination-gail-harrison-marketing-branding-president-1201725127/ http://variety.com/2016/film/news/illumination-gail-harrison...

aerovistae 11y ago
This small profile of Gail Harrison seems largely irrelevant and reads like you're trying to hype her up to make some sort of a sell.
- Animats 11y ago
  It's more about blame. Someone whose job implies a professional understanding of humor at scale signed off on this. How did that happen? A good question for the trades (Variety, THR) to take up.
  - Absentinsomniac 11y ago
    Maybe google just licensed or asked to use it as a part of an undefined April fools joke, and she / they assumed Google wouldn't do something irresponsible?
    - Animats 11y ago
      We don't know. But she should, and the trade magazines can ask her. Hollywood talks to the press.
  - newman8r 11y ago
    I don't think the prank hurts her brand - it may help it.

wodenokoto 11y ago

A typical Google April 1st joke is a product announcement (Google Japan hit the front page with theirs earlier) but this one is the opportunity for users to prank other users (and easily doing it by mistake) Since users are quite good at doing everything you don't want them to do, this create great opportunities for mistakes and abuse.

swiley 11y ago

This is why web apps are bad. (among other reasons) The UI can change for any reason without you knowing and with no way to stop it.

sergiosgc 11y ago
That is also why they are good. The UI will change and evolve and perfect, without you thinking about it. -- Glass half-full kind of guy.
- swiley 11y ago
  Hahaha. I don't think I've ever used a single web app where the UI got better over time. Perhaps hn is the only exception.

CM30 11y ago

Laughter definitely scales. I mean, how many other tech companies did April Fools Day jokes yesterday? Tons of them, yet it's mostly Google that's getting the criticism for messing up here. Google's problem was this joke was forced on people, even when they weren't in a mood to make any jokes. If it was an optional button to the right, or activated by some other means that wasn't 'click a button that many people used, or sometimes have it wotk automatically', then people wouldn't be complaining about it.

gragas 11y ago

>and, sometimes, if you’re a woman, by a miscellany of invasive threats What the heck? I'm not a woman, so apparently no one can threaten me on the internet? Sure women probably receive far more internet threats, but we should use language to reflect that, rather than outright lying and trivializing all the instances where men were threatened.

iopq 11y ago
Actually, men receive just as many Internet threats, but they tend to ignore them, while women tend to take them seriously.