11 ms·

The Hierarchy of Cringe

202 points by longdefeat 7y ago

dashwav 7y ago
Man I absolutely love this theme he is using. Took a while to find the post but here is the info on the current design. https://aelkus.github.io/site/2019/09/10/design-sources https://aelkus.github.io/site/2019/09/10/design-sources Honestly the design is so nice it makes me want to get around to finishing setting up a blog
- pyronite 7y ago
  I find the font hard to read... I feel like fixed-width fonts are better suited for coding or terminals. The width of the columns are also a bit larger than recommended for web typography (whatever that's worth to you). At full width, the blog shows about 120 characters per line. I've seen the optimal line length suggested as 50-80 characters. Compare... Default (1160px): https://i.imgur.com/6I33kYB.png https://i.imgur.com/6I33kYB.png Constrained (800px): https://i.imgur.com/lcb6Qd6.png https://i.imgur.com/lcb6Qd6.png It definitely tracks better to me at a reduced width, but your mileage may vary. What is it that appeals to you the most about the blog's design? Admittedly it looks different and lots of sites look the same now. Someone like me would probably push to make it look more like Medium.
  - dashwav 7y ago
    It being a different cut by a different cloth is a big draw for me if I'm honest (I am getting tired of reading image heavy medium blogs), and I really dig the overall aesthetic it gives off. I personally like the wider text, I wish more sites did it, although I would agree that maybe 80-100 chars per line would be more readable overall after seeing that comparison instead of the full 120. I also like how minimal the header and footers are, instead of being greeted by a full 1920x1080 image and having to scroll a whole page to the content it's right there ready for me. Not that I think every blog should adapt to this style specifically, but I really appreciate it being what it is myself.
- xwdv 7y ago
  His page though is heavy for what it is, he could have shaved down several KB getting rid of bootstrap css and replacing jquery with simple inline JavaScript. I hope he does.
  - enriquto 7y ago
    Or remove javascript entirely. It's a damn block of text with zero interactive content. Why would you ever need javasccript for that?
    - dashwav 7y ago
      It's a jekyll site automatically built with github pages. I personally can absolutely see the trade off of not having to manage and build your own website just to post some thoughts of yours, especially with the modern internet where a few kb of javascript is really probably not going to make too much of a difference to the majority of your audience.
      - tenryuu 7y ago
        I built my github pages blog with hugo and it still contains no javascript. But I also did some digging around, I don't think any of these pages actually use javascript at all. The two references at the bottom are the only two usages of script anywhere
positr0n 7y ago
> Being blocked by someone you never heard of is a common experience online, as is the recognition that they likely have no idea that they are blocking you. What is this talking about? I've never experienced that (I don't think). It sounds like people share adblock-style blocklists of social media accounts?
- devin 7y ago
  There was an effort to do something like what you’re describing some years back. I think I heard about a volunteer effort to build something like this around the time of gamergate.
  - byuu 7y ago
    Block Together. A list blocking 100,000 people belonging to group X sometimes sweeps up people outside the group for the crime of eg following a friend who is part of said group. There is also intentional sabotage in adding someone innocent that a maintainer dislikes to such lists.
- xxpor 7y ago
  Blocklists are common in certain corners of twitter (leftist twitter for example)
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  There are groups which tend to attract heavy abuse. Disadvantaged minorities and celebrities tend to share in this, with some interesting intersections. Since blocking one annoying user at a time is itself tedious and something of a denial of service attack, common blocklists get created, and shared. When these affect out-groups, the impacts are relatively benign. Celbs' lists, given the share/rebroadcast nature of several social media platforms (notably Twitter), mean that getting on one of these lists is akin to being erased from the platform -- if your posts are invisible to a large fraction of the many-followers set, you lose amplification. This can be an appropriate and intended consequence (don't be an annoying git if you rely on others spreading your message(s)), or not (adding personal enemies to inappropriate lists, inadvertant additions to lists). A problem with shared blacklists generally. I witnessed some of this and resulting fallout in a Mastodon incident which had carried over from Twitter, August of 2018. Effective and fair abuse and harassment countermeasures are challenging.
omosubi 7y ago
I think the topic of cringe is a interesting one that the internet really amplifies but I can't for the life of me figure out what he's trying to say in this post
- rgoulter 7y ago
  I take it as: People dunk on other people on the internet for doing/saying dumb stuff. But everyone pretty much seems to follow a pattern most of the time, anyway. (And you don't feel all that 'special' if all you do/say could be reliably reproduced by a simple flowchart). You dunk on others to feel better about yourself; although really you could just as well be dunked on for what you do/say, too.
- larnmar 7y ago
  I think what he’s saying is that cringe humour appeals mostly to those who know that they are pretty cringeworthy themselves. While everyone can enjoy an occasional piece of cringe humour, the sort of person who spends a lot of time on /r/cringe is the sort of person that others would find embarrassing, working hard to reassure themselves that others are worse off than they. Kinda like how /r/fatpeoplehate was mostly filled with secretly fat people laughing at the really fat people.
  - justanotherjoe 7y ago
    that's it? How did this get upvoted so high in HN?
  - DagAgren 7y ago
    I think that's the wrong angle to take. People who obsess over cringe are people who desperately need to find someone to feel better about. It's a symptom of low self esteem and self-loathing, amplified by internet-powered vicious cycles. That MAY mean that that person is also "cringey" by someone's reckoning, but that framing traps you in the same framework of self-loathing. This is an extremely toxic mindset, and it is something that you should always work hard to break yourself out of.
    - 7y ago
706f7bfa0c5b 7y ago
Cringe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF2uHwOg2kk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF2uHwOg2kk
Thorentis 7y ago
Is it just me, or was there no actual hierarchy discussed? I was expecting a pyramid of cringe, or at least a list of varying levels of cringe. Instead I got a lengthy discussion about how he doesn't like that people stereotype other people on the Internet (as if that is unique to the Internet). Low quality and poorly named post in my opinion (nice looking blog though).
- t0astbread 7y ago
  I'm not sure if you're serious but I like how meta that was.
whoisjuan 7y ago
Cringe humor is extremely popular within the meme culture and that's not surprising. Memes are so incredibly fascinating from whatever angle you want to analyze them. It is so bizarre that this concept of producing and composing images that capture/represent a feeling, a historic moment, a situation, a thought, etc, can create this massive meta-culture with its own rules and social implications. Social media wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't for the meme culture. Just think about it. How many companies exist because of these memes that we share. Reddit, Imgur, Giphy, Gfycat, 9Gag, Kapwing, the hundreds of thousands of meme accounts on Instagram... All these companies and organized entities exist because of memes. That is so surreal. What was the creative outlet of regular people before the meme culture? It feels so massive and unhinged that it almost makes me think that we didn't have anything equivalent before.
- manmal 7y ago
  I think it's a way that people found in order to participate in a collective endeavor of creativity over the internet. Many people like brainstorming sessions, where everything is allowed and almost no idea is actively invalidated by others. It's a group experience that's usually rare (constrained to school projects and some company meetings), and socially awkward people might not enjoy them in a live setting. I think Memes are kinda like those brainstorming sessions, but they are async, introverts can enjoy them, and they go on ad finitum.
- hi5eyes 7y ago
  memes are interwoven with the language of the youth/modern internet so much so that brands even legacy designer fashion adopt memes/intentionally use promo that will get memed i dont know if this is good as the trend goes on seeing how something cannot really exist on the internet unless its been shitposted to a considerable level. the discussions about tiktok on hn and the rate content is being consumed/shaping our brains and the ways we communicate.
- GuiA 7y ago
  > What was the creative outlet of regular people before the meme culture? Still memes; albeit in the form of jokes, idioms, quotations, fables, etc. The novelty here is the tools that now allow us to create pictorial content and share it ad infinitum for virtually free. There are many illustrations/postcards/woodcarvings from Victorian England/Edo japan/etc that are all but memes in names (they even had the same disproportionate representation of cats!), they just couldn’t be shared as broadly and instantaneously.
idonotknowwhy 7y ago
I guess I'm getting old. I read the article and the comment here, and have no idea what you're all talking about.
- pferde 7y ago
  Yep, me neither. The best I can tell is that it's a new children's term. If a kid says "that's cringe", it means "I don't like that".
  - Neekerer 7y ago
    ok boomer
    - kls 7y ago
      given that he/she is on HN, my assumption would be that they are a Gen-X'er at the earliest. Gen-X'ers saw and built the dawn of the internet/web so they still hold life outside the web in high regard and while we "get" a lot of the tech life stuff, we find participation to not be as important as younger generations. Then there is just stuff we don't see the point in, not that it's not important, rather it's just lost in generation translation.
      - pferde 7y ago
        I'm sorry, I'm not from USA, so these US-centric tribal designations do not mean anything to me. I'm in my late 30s, if it helps.
        kls 7y ago
        lat 30's would place you as a gen-x'er IIRC gen-X ran from 61 to 81. https://www.kasasa.com/articles/generations/gen-x-gen-y-gen-z https://www.kasasa.com/articles/generations/gen-x-gen-y-gen-...
    - Invictus0 7y ago
      This is not even a correct use of the meme, you are now cringe.
some_furry 7y ago
> If you say “that furry is a degenerate” you will be accused of discrimination. Don’t slut-shame, don’t kink-shame, don’t gatekeep. More specifically, because of the demographics of the furry fandom, most people who hate furries do so because it lets them be homophobic without the social consequences of being clearly homophobic.
- lagadu 7y ago
  You're saying that there are higher rates of homosexuality among furries or am I misinterpreting that? If so, what makes you think so?
  - DagAgren 7y ago
    Furries tend to be a lot more open-minded about the entire queer spectrum.
    - kls 7y ago
      So do people in the arts but that does not mean all or a significant percentage of artist are homosexual. It just means that group tends to attract a more liberal mindset on sexuality. There was a period when the arts where looked on as deviant.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Well for one it is observed that open bisexuality or pansexuality seems to be far more common among the subculture than the general population. Occasionally it is joked that bisexuality is the norm. Homophobia generally includes any same sex attraction.
swiley 7y ago
I have to say while subreddits like /r/cringe bother me in some ways I’m thankful for them because after growing up homeschooled and relatively isolated there where a lot of subtle social ideas I really didn’t understand. I think without them I probably would be a lot less pleasant to be around.
mirimir 7y ago
> In a later post, I will look at a different side of this problem – how Internet subcultures are obsessed with evading negative social judgment and why this obsession can go too far. I'm looking forward to that. It's another reason to use multiple well-isolated personas.
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  One of the main reasons I stopped posting on Facebook and scrubbed my IG presence. I feel like this has gotten pretty commonplace, actually.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Not long after I discovered Usenet and email lists, I decided that anonymous coward was the way to go. And more so after hanging out on various web forums. We didn't call it "social media" back then, but people did get doxed occasionally. And online anger did sometimes spill over into meatspace. I did not want my professional reputation to be damaged because of something (even something truly cringeworthy) that I'd posted somewhere. And then there was the FBI investigation of Jim Bell, which involved subpoenas to several cypherpunks contributors. There was also an investigation of some truly crazy itinerant folksinger, who had posted some of the most amazing rants that I've ever read. Edit: It was Carl Edward Johnson aka Toto aka TruthMonger. See https://people.well.com/user/declan/toto/ https://people.well.com/user/declan/toto/ I'd quote some, but it's definitely cringeworthy.
    - ParadigmaShift 7y ago
      You really should worry about the FBI.
AgentME 7y ago
I think many internet communities can be understood by figuring out their in-group/out-group standards. 4chan's /g/ board will make fun of "normies" that can't assemble a computer, and /v/ will make fun of normies that aren't willing to embrace something as fun as videogames. Progressive subreddits will make fun of easily-debunkable political misinformation and the kinds of people that peddle it, and sciencey subreddits will call out various other kinds of misinformation and its peddlers. In some places, the out-group is "SJWs", and in other places, the out-group is the kind of person that spends too much time complaining about "SJWs". There's an in-group/out-group dynamic being used in all of these situations that can feel fun to be in on. (Not trying to say all of these divisions are equally arbitrary. Many people have their own reasons for preferring specific setups rather than others, but someone in any of these setups will automatically get a feel-good bonus from the tribal part of their mind.) Cringe humor is a quick way to bring up the in-group/out-group dynamic or to temporarily spawn a new instance of the dynamic. Places with predefined in-group/out-group dynamics are attractive to people not just so people can experience being in an in-group, but also because as long as you're not part of the out-group, you're unlikely to be randomly targeted as an example of cringe/out-group. (I think this part explains a lot of the popularity of Trump despite scandals: Some of his fans know or will acknowledge he's doing bad things, but it's just considered much less important than the belief that Trump will never punch in the direction of his fans but the other side will. -- Hopefully a connection to politics doesn't feel too out of place here. In-group/out-group dynamics seem like something common to human psychology that we should expect to see in many places.)
- leftyted 7y ago
  I think you're dead-on. The cringe analysis is mostly subsumed by in-group/out-group analysis. > (I think this part explains a lot of the popularity of Trump despite scandals: Some of his fans know or will acknowledge he's doing bad things, but it's just considered much less important than the belief that Trump will never punch in the direction of his fans but the other side will. -- Hopefully a connection to politics doesn't feel too out of place here. In-group/out-group dynamics seem like something common to human psychology that we should expect to see in many places.) I don't think this is accurate. I think that Trump's popularity is mostly due to his "realness". He's the exact opposite of a career politician. He doesn't talk like a lawyer and, despite being rich, he has an everyman quality to him. He's incredibly unpretentious. Trump reminds me of something from Notes from a Dead House. Dostoevsky describes a prison warden who was beloved by the inmates due to his homespun character despite the fact that he took pleasure in beating them: > There are men who are far from being kind, and who have yet the talent of making themselves popular; they do not despise the people who are beneath their rule. That, I think, is the cause of this popularity. They do not give themselves lordly airs; they have no feeling of "caste;" they have a certain odour of the people; they are men of birth, and the people at once sniff it. They will do anything for such men; they will gladly change the mildest and most humane man for a very severe chief, if the latter possesses this sort of odour, and especially if the man is also genial in his way. Oh! then he is beyond price. > Lieutenant Smekaloff, as I have said, ordered sometimes very severe punishments. But he seemed to inflict them in such a way, that the prisoners felt no rancour against him. On the contrary, they recalled his whipping affairs with laughter; he did not punish frequently, for he had no artistic imagination. That's Trump as far as I'm concerned.
nicky0 7y ago
One of the most interesting things I have read for a while. It puts the finger on a lot of perhaps unconscious thoughts about experiences I have had on line. Why even partake in online communities, is a good question. It seems to lead to pain and self-loathing.
rjknight 7y ago
The author is using "cringe" as something of a euphemism here. "Cringe" in this case is anything that a person could say that would cause other people to think badly of them, including highly offensive things, so long as the person saying it doesn't fully understand why. It doesn't have to be universally cringey, like watching someone do really bad karaoke. It might only be cringey within a small subculture. Say you're used to discussing programming languages. You and your fellows have developed a well-understood notion of why static typing is better than dynamic typing. Then along comes some fool who has watched too many Rich Hickey videos who wants to tell you that types are just guard rails and nobody would navigate by bouncing off the guard rails when they could just drive to their destination. This is cringey because you've heard this argument before, the interloper ought to know that you've heard this before and taken it into account, and it's clear that they're just repeating some argument that they've heard somewhere else. One could have a "stupid things dynamic typers say" bingo-card, with the guard rail argument on it. One could regard the dynamic typer as a kind of NPC bot, popping up to spout the scripted phrases of his kind of person. And it's cringey to watch someone do that. This phenomenon is what the OP is trying to describe, except that on Twitter the subject matter is unlikely to be static vs. dynamic types, but something political which covers much larger categories of people. The fact that so many commenters here are baffled by this suggests that the phenomenon, or at least this intuitive understanding of it, is not quite as widespread as the OP (and I!) might assume, though.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  That’s why pseudo-anonymity and by extension anonymity are more important now than ever. I never speak my mind on any platform with my real name on it. It’s simply too risky. There may come a time when you could be jailed for what you wrote.
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    And I say stupid things with my real name attached all the time to do my small part in preventing that future. I'm not afraid to attach my name to what I believe in (and really, quite a lot I probably don't) I also think people are fooling themselves if they think they can really hide their identity behind a screen name. Staying silent and hiding in the shadows enables that kind of future and can be seen as a pretty good cause of those sorts of things happening around the world throughout history.
faissaloo 7y ago
Bro you just posted cringe, you are going to lose subscribers
jstewartmobile 7y ago
Using a monospaced font for prose, and putting Mishima anywhere near a "cringe hierarchy" are the most cringe-worthy things I've seen today. And boy howdy have I seen some cringe!
baked_ziti 7y ago
Can someone tell me what the Mishima quotation has to do with the content of the article.
tzebby49 7y ago
Well it exists in a evolutionary process. What people were cringing about in the early 2000s are now no longer cringworthy. I think this is part of what Baudrillard terms the simulacrum. What was cringeworthy thousands of years ago? Was there a concept or cringe? These are interesting questions.
currymj 7y ago
when your brain gets to this point, just log off and go look at a tree or something. this is serious overexposure to twitter.
- mistermann 7y ago
  I would argue that the sort of thing the author is describing is fairly pervasive (and growing rapidly) in society, and may be having effects to a far underappreciated degree. Rather than logging off and ignoring it, I think we need more out of the box thinking like this, from as many seemingly bizarre perspectives as possible, not less.
- rchaud 7y ago
  This is all over Reddit as well unfortunately. I don't spend much time at all on Twitter, but I recognized what the author was talking about as I'm on Reddit. "Cringe" really doesn't require or merit this level of philosophical analysis. Since Reddit banned subreddits built around mocking/shaming minority groups and overweight people, "cringe" became its replacement. It's a way to signal to other people whose lives revolved around abusing people online, that something is a target to pile on against. A 20-second video of someone playing rap music from a BT speaker in the subway? "Cringe", aka "let me use this to make a broad generalization about the lifestyle and career prospects of this person". I don't know how old the average Reddit user who posts on those subs are, but I sincerely hope they grow out of it once they get out a bit more and meet people not exactly like themselves.
ArtWomb 7y ago
Can't comment on the relevance of "cringe" culture. But I like the site design very much. Font family is called "Inconsolata" ;) https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
balt_s 7y ago
Based article.
- spacesuitman2 7y ago
  Based and redpilled.
naringas 7y ago
I've started to think that we, as individual humans, are far more of a statistical phenomenon than we would like. I predict that at some point, once the mathematics have been distilled out from quantum mechanics, and extended to n-dimensional "particles", that humans behavior will be predicted by some sort of a n-dimensional wave equation (with values of n in the thousands or hundreds of thousands).
motohagiography 7y ago
The topic is covered more rigorously in the book, "Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust" (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/yuck https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/yuck) When you look at the policing of discourse, you can see cringe as exploiting the much deeper sentiment of disgust, where there is a bunch of prior art discussing it.

202 points by longdefeat 7y ago

Man I absolutely love this theme he is using. Took a while to find the post but here is the info on the current design. https://aelkus.github.io/site/2019/09/10/design-sources https://aelkus.github.io/site/2019/09/10/design-sources Honestly the design is so nice it makes me want to get around to finishing setting up a blog

pyronite 7y ago
I find the font hard to read... I feel like fixed-width fonts are better suited for coding or terminals. The width of the columns are also a bit larger than recommended for web typography (whatever that's worth to you). At full width, the blog shows about 120 characters per line. I've seen the optimal line length suggested as 50-80 characters. Compare... Default (1160px): https://i.imgur.com/6I33kYB.png https://i.imgur.com/6I33kYB.png Constrained (800px): https://i.imgur.com/lcb6Qd6.png https://i.imgur.com/lcb6Qd6.png It definitely tracks better to me at a reduced width, but your mileage may vary. What is it that appeals to you the most about the blog's design? Admittedly it looks different and lots of sites look the same now. Someone like me would probably push to make it look more like Medium.
- dashwav 7y ago
  It being a different cut by a different cloth is a big draw for me if I'm honest (I am getting tired of reading image heavy medium blogs), and I really dig the overall aesthetic it gives off. I personally like the wider text, I wish more sites did it, although I would agree that maybe 80-100 chars per line would be more readable overall after seeing that comparison instead of the full 120. I also like how minimal the header and footers are, instead of being greeted by a full 1920x1080 image and having to scroll a whole page to the content it's right there ready for me. Not that I think every blog should adapt to this style specifically, but I really appreciate it being what it is myself.
xwdv 7y ago
His page though is heavy for what it is, he could have shaved down several KB getting rid of bootstrap css and replacing jquery with simple inline JavaScript. I hope he does.
- enriquto 7y ago
  Or remove javascript entirely. It's a damn block of text with zero interactive content. Why would you ever need javasccript for that?
  - dashwav 7y ago
    It's a jekyll site automatically built with github pages. I personally can absolutely see the trade off of not having to manage and build your own website just to post some thoughts of yours, especially with the modern internet where a few kb of javascript is really probably not going to make too much of a difference to the majority of your audience.
    - tenryuu 7y ago
      I built my github pages blog with hugo and it still contains no javascript. But I also did some digging around, I don't think any of these pages actually use javascript at all. The two references at the bottom are the only two usages of script anywhere

positr0n 7y ago

> Being blocked by someone you never heard of is a common experience online, as is the recognition that they likely have no idea that they are blocking you. What is this talking about? I've never experienced that (I don't think). It sounds like people share adblock-style blocklists of social media accounts?

devin 7y ago
There was an effort to do something like what you’re describing some years back. I think I heard about a volunteer effort to build something like this around the time of gamergate.
- byuu 7y ago
  Block Together. A list blocking 100,000 people belonging to group X sometimes sweeps up people outside the group for the crime of eg following a friend who is part of said group. There is also intentional sabotage in adding someone innocent that a maintainer dislikes to such lists.
xxpor 7y ago
Blocklists are common in certain corners of twitter (leftist twitter for example)
dredmorbius 7y ago
There are groups which tend to attract heavy abuse. Disadvantaged minorities and celebrities tend to share in this, with some interesting intersections. Since blocking one annoying user at a time is itself tedious and something of a denial of service attack, common blocklists get created, and shared. When these affect out-groups, the impacts are relatively benign. Celbs' lists, given the share/rebroadcast nature of several social media platforms (notably Twitter), mean that getting on one of these lists is akin to being erased from the platform -- if your posts are invisible to a large fraction of the many-followers set, you lose amplification. This can be an appropriate and intended consequence (don't be an annoying git if you rely on others spreading your message(s)), or not (adding personal enemies to inappropriate lists, inadvertant additions to lists). A problem with shared blacklists generally. I witnessed some of this and resulting fallout in a Mastodon incident which had carried over from Twitter, August of 2018. Effective and fair abuse and harassment countermeasures are challenging.

omosubi 7y ago

I think the topic of cringe is a interesting one that the internet really amplifies but I can't for the life of me figure out what he's trying to say in this post

rgoulter 7y ago
I take it as: People dunk on other people on the internet for doing/saying dumb stuff. But everyone pretty much seems to follow a pattern most of the time, anyway. (And you don't feel all that 'special' if all you do/say could be reliably reproduced by a simple flowchart). You dunk on others to feel better about yourself; although really you could just as well be dunked on for what you do/say, too.
larnmar 7y ago
I think what he’s saying is that cringe humour appeals mostly to those who know that they are pretty cringeworthy themselves. While everyone can enjoy an occasional piece of cringe humour, the sort of person who spends a lot of time on /r/cringe is the sort of person that others would find embarrassing, working hard to reassure themselves that others are worse off than they. Kinda like how /r/fatpeoplehate was mostly filled with secretly fat people laughing at the really fat people.
- justanotherjoe 7y ago
  that's it? How did this get upvoted so high in HN?
- DagAgren 7y ago
  I think that's the wrong angle to take. People who obsess over cringe are people who desperately need to find someone to feel better about. It's a symptom of low self esteem and self-loathing, amplified by internet-powered vicious cycles. That MAY mean that that person is also "cringey" by someone's reckoning, but that framing traps you in the same framework of self-loathing. This is an extremely toxic mindset, and it is something that you should always work hard to break yourself out of.
  - 7y ago

706f7bfa0c5b 7y ago

Cringe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF2uHwOg2kk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF2uHwOg2kk

Thorentis 7y ago

Is it just me, or was there no actual hierarchy discussed? I was expecting a pyramid of cringe, or at least a list of varying levels of cringe. Instead I got a lengthy discussion about how he doesn't like that people stereotype other people on the Internet (as if that is unique to the Internet). Low quality and poorly named post in my opinion (nice looking blog though).

t0astbread 7y ago
I'm not sure if you're serious but I like how meta that was.

whoisjuan 7y ago

Cringe humor is extremely popular within the meme culture and that's not surprising. Memes are so incredibly fascinating from whatever angle you want to analyze them. It is so bizarre that this concept of producing and composing images that capture/represent a feeling, a historic moment, a situation, a thought, etc, can create this massive meta-culture with its own rules and social implications. Social media wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't for the meme culture. Just think about it. How many companies exist because of these memes that we share. Reddit, Imgur, Giphy, Gfycat, 9Gag, Kapwing, the hundreds of thousands of meme accounts on Instagram... All these companies and organized entities exist because of memes. That is so surreal. What was the creative outlet of regular people before the meme culture? It feels so massive and unhinged that it almost makes me think that we didn't have anything equivalent before.

manmal 7y ago
I think it's a way that people found in order to participate in a collective endeavor of creativity over the internet. Many people like brainstorming sessions, where everything is allowed and almost no idea is actively invalidated by others. It's a group experience that's usually rare (constrained to school projects and some company meetings), and socially awkward people might not enjoy them in a live setting. I think Memes are kinda like those brainstorming sessions, but they are async, introverts can enjoy them, and they go on ad finitum.
hi5eyes 7y ago
memes are interwoven with the language of the youth/modern internet so much so that brands even legacy designer fashion adopt memes/intentionally use promo that will get memed i dont know if this is good as the trend goes on seeing how something cannot really exist on the internet unless its been shitposted to a considerable level. the discussions about tiktok on hn and the rate content is being consumed/shaping our brains and the ways we communicate.
GuiA 7y ago
> What was the creative outlet of regular people before the meme culture? Still memes; albeit in the form of jokes, idioms, quotations, fables, etc. The novelty here is the tools that now allow us to create pictorial content and share it ad infinitum for virtually free. There are many illustrations/postcards/woodcarvings from Victorian England/Edo japan/etc that are all but memes in names (they even had the same disproportionate representation of cats!), they just couldn’t be shared as broadly and instantaneously.

idonotknowwhy 7y ago

I guess I'm getting old. I read the article and the comment here, and have no idea what you're all talking about.

pferde 7y ago
Yep, me neither. The best I can tell is that it's a new children's term. If a kid says "that's cringe", it means "I don't like that".
- Neekerer 7y ago
  ok boomer
  - kls 7y ago
    given that he/she is on HN, my assumption would be that they are a Gen-X'er at the earliest. Gen-X'ers saw and built the dawn of the internet/web so they still hold life outside the web in high regard and while we "get" a lot of the tech life stuff, we find participation to not be as important as younger generations. Then there is just stuff we don't see the point in, not that it's not important, rather it's just lost in generation translation.
    - pferde 7y ago
      I'm sorry, I'm not from USA, so these US-centric tribal designations do not mean anything to me. I'm in my late 30s, if it helps.
      - kls 7y ago
        lat 30's would place you as a gen-x'er IIRC gen-X ran from 61 to 81. https://www.kasasa.com/articles/generations/gen-x-gen-y-gen-z https://www.kasasa.com/articles/generations/gen-x-gen-y-gen-...
  - Invictus0 7y ago
    This is not even a correct use of the meme, you are now cringe.

some_furry 7y ago

> If you say “that furry is a degenerate” you will be accused of discrimination. Don’t slut-shame, don’t kink-shame, don’t gatekeep. More specifically, because of the demographics of the furry fandom, most people who hate furries do so because it lets them be homophobic without the social consequences of being clearly homophobic.

lagadu 7y ago
You're saying that there are higher rates of homosexuality among furries or am I misinterpreting that? If so, what makes you think so?
- DagAgren 7y ago
  Furries tend to be a lot more open-minded about the entire queer spectrum.
  - kls 7y ago
    So do people in the arts but that does not mean all or a significant percentage of artist are homosexual. It just means that group tends to attract a more liberal mindset on sexuality. There was a period when the arts where looked on as deviant.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Well for one it is observed that open bisexuality or pansexuality seems to be far more common among the subculture than the general population. Occasionally it is joked that bisexuality is the norm. Homophobia generally includes any same sex attraction.

swiley 7y ago

I have to say while subreddits like /r/cringe bother me in some ways I’m thankful for them because after growing up homeschooled and relatively isolated there where a lot of subtle social ideas I really didn’t understand. I think without them I probably would be a lot less pleasant to be around.

mirimir 7y ago

> In a later post, I will look at a different side of this problem – how Internet subcultures are obsessed with evading negative social judgment and why this obsession can go too far. I'm looking forward to that. It's another reason to use multiple well-isolated personas.

yowlingcat 7y ago
One of the main reasons I stopped posting on Facebook and scrubbed my IG presence. I feel like this has gotten pretty commonplace, actually.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Not long after I discovered Usenet and email lists, I decided that anonymous coward was the way to go. And more so after hanging out on various web forums. We didn't call it "social media" back then, but people did get doxed occasionally. And online anger did sometimes spill over into meatspace. I did not want my professional reputation to be damaged because of something (even something truly cringeworthy) that I'd posted somewhere. And then there was the FBI investigation of Jim Bell, which involved subpoenas to several cypherpunks contributors. There was also an investigation of some truly crazy itinerant folksinger, who had posted some of the most amazing rants that I've ever read. Edit: It was Carl Edward Johnson aka Toto aka TruthMonger. See https://people.well.com/user/declan/toto/ https://people.well.com/user/declan/toto/ I'd quote some, but it's definitely cringeworthy.
  - ParadigmaShift 7y ago
    You really should worry about the FBI.

AgentME 7y ago

I think many internet communities can be understood by figuring out their in-group/out-group standards. 4chan's /g/ board will make fun of "normies" that can't assemble a computer, and /v/ will make fun of normies that aren't willing to embrace something as fun as videogames. Progressive subreddits will make fun of easily-debunkable political misinformation and the kinds of people that peddle it, and sciencey subreddits will call out various other kinds of misinformation and its peddlers. In some places, the out-group is "SJWs", and in other places, the out-group is the kind of person that spends too much time complaining about "SJWs". There's an in-group/out-group dynamic being used in all of these situations that can feel fun to be in on. (Not trying to say all of these divisions are equally arbitrary. Many people have their own reasons for preferring specific setups rather than others, but someone in any of these setups will automatically get a feel-good bonus from the tribal part of their mind.) Cringe humor is a quick way to bring up the in-group/out-group dynamic or to temporarily spawn a new instance of the dynamic. Places with predefined in-group/out-group dynamics are attractive to people not just so people can experience being in an in-group, but also because as long as you're not part of the out-group, you're unlikely to be randomly targeted as an example of cringe/out-group. (I think this part explains a lot of the popularity of Trump despite scandals: Some of his fans know or will acknowledge he's doing bad things, but it's just considered much less important than the belief that Trump will never punch in the direction of his fans but the other side will. -- Hopefully a connection to politics doesn't feel too out of place here. In-group/out-group dynamics seem like something common to human psychology that we should expect to see in many places.)

leftyted 7y ago
I think you're dead-on. The cringe analysis is mostly subsumed by in-group/out-group analysis. > (I think this part explains a lot of the popularity of Trump despite scandals: Some of his fans know or will acknowledge he's doing bad things, but it's just considered much less important than the belief that Trump will never punch in the direction of his fans but the other side will. -- Hopefully a connection to politics doesn't feel too out of place here. In-group/out-group dynamics seem like something common to human psychology that we should expect to see in many places.) I don't think this is accurate. I think that Trump's popularity is mostly due to his "realness". He's the exact opposite of a career politician. He doesn't talk like a lawyer and, despite being rich, he has an everyman quality to him. He's incredibly unpretentious. Trump reminds me of something from Notes from a Dead House. Dostoevsky describes a prison warden who was beloved by the inmates due to his homespun character despite the fact that he took pleasure in beating them: > There are men who are far from being kind, and who have yet the talent of making themselves popular; they do not despise the people who are beneath their rule. That, I think, is the cause of this popularity. They do not give themselves lordly airs; they have no feeling of "caste;" they have a certain odour of the people; they are men of birth, and the people at once sniff it. They will do anything for such men; they will gladly change the mildest and most humane man for a very severe chief, if the latter possesses this sort of odour, and especially if the man is also genial in his way. Oh! then he is beyond price. > Lieutenant Smekaloff, as I have said, ordered sometimes very severe punishments. But he seemed to inflict them in such a way, that the prisoners felt no rancour against him. On the contrary, they recalled his whipping affairs with laughter; he did not punish frequently, for he had no artistic imagination. That's Trump as far as I'm concerned.

nicky0 7y ago

One of the most interesting things I have read for a while. It puts the finger on a lot of perhaps unconscious thoughts about experiences I have had on line. Why even partake in online communities, is a good question. It seems to lead to pain and self-loathing.

rjknight 7y ago

The author is using "cringe" as something of a euphemism here. "Cringe" in this case is anything that a person could say that would cause other people to think badly of them, including highly offensive things, so long as the person saying it doesn't fully understand why. It doesn't have to be universally cringey, like watching someone do really bad karaoke. It might only be cringey within a small subculture. Say you're used to discussing programming languages. You and your fellows have developed a well-understood notion of why static typing is better than dynamic typing. Then along comes some fool who has watched too many Rich Hickey videos who wants to tell you that types are just guard rails and nobody would navigate by bouncing off the guard rails when they could just drive to their destination. This is cringey because you've heard this argument before, the interloper ought to know that you've heard this before and taken it into account, and it's clear that they're just repeating some argument that they've heard somewhere else. One could have a "stupid things dynamic typers say" bingo-card, with the guard rail argument on it. One could regard the dynamic typer as a kind of NPC bot, popping up to spout the scripted phrases of his kind of person. And it's cringey to watch someone do that. This phenomenon is what the OP is trying to describe, except that on Twitter the subject matter is unlikely to be static vs. dynamic types, but something political which covers much larger categories of people. The fact that so many commenters here are baffled by this suggests that the phenomenon, or at least this intuitive understanding of it, is not quite as widespread as the OP (and I!) might assume, though.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago
That’s why pseudo-anonymity and by extension anonymity are more important now than ever. I never speak my mind on any platform with my real name on it. It’s simply too risky. There may come a time when you could be jailed for what you wrote.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  And I say stupid things with my real name attached all the time to do my small part in preventing that future. I'm not afraid to attach my name to what I believe in (and really, quite a lot I probably don't) I also think people are fooling themselves if they think they can really hide their identity behind a screen name. Staying silent and hiding in the shadows enables that kind of future and can be seen as a pretty good cause of those sorts of things happening around the world throughout history.

faissaloo 7y ago

Bro you just posted cringe, you are going to lose subscribers

jstewartmobile 7y ago

Using a monospaced font for prose, and putting Mishima anywhere near a "cringe hierarchy" are the most cringe-worthy things I've seen today. And boy howdy have I seen some cringe!

baked_ziti 7y ago

Can someone tell me what the Mishima quotation has to do with the content of the article.

tzebby49 7y ago

Well it exists in a evolutionary process. What people were cringing about in the early 2000s are now no longer cringworthy. I think this is part of what Baudrillard terms the simulacrum. What was cringeworthy thousands of years ago? Was there a concept or cringe? These are interesting questions.

currymj 7y ago

when your brain gets to this point, just log off and go look at a tree or something. this is serious overexposure to twitter.

mistermann 7y ago
I would argue that the sort of thing the author is describing is fairly pervasive (and growing rapidly) in society, and may be having effects to a far underappreciated degree. Rather than logging off and ignoring it, I think we need more out of the box thinking like this, from as many seemingly bizarre perspectives as possible, not less.
rchaud 7y ago
This is all over Reddit as well unfortunately. I don't spend much time at all on Twitter, but I recognized what the author was talking about as I'm on Reddit. "Cringe" really doesn't require or merit this level of philosophical analysis. Since Reddit banned subreddits built around mocking/shaming minority groups and overweight people, "cringe" became its replacement. It's a way to signal to other people whose lives revolved around abusing people online, that something is a target to pile on against. A 20-second video of someone playing rap music from a BT speaker in the subway? "Cringe", aka "let me use this to make a broad generalization about the lifestyle and career prospects of this person". I don't know how old the average Reddit user who posts on those subs are, but I sincerely hope they grow out of it once they get out a bit more and meet people not exactly like themselves.

ArtWomb 7y ago

Can't comment on the relevance of "cringe" culture. But I like the site design very much. Font family is called "Inconsolata" ;) https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

balt_s 7y ago

Based article.

spacesuitman2 7y ago
Based and redpilled.

naringas 7y ago

I've started to think that we, as individual humans, are far more of a statistical phenomenon than we would like. I predict that at some point, once the mathematics have been distilled out from quantum mechanics, and extended to n-dimensional "particles", that humans behavior will be predicted by some sort of a n-dimensional wave equation (with values of n in the thousands or hundreds of thousands).

motohagiography 7y ago

The topic is covered more rigorously in the book, "Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust" (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/yuck https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/yuck) When you look at the policing of discourse, you can see cringe as exploiting the much deeper sentiment of disgust, where there is a bunch of prior art discussing it.