I think at this point we can conclude that humor of any form no matter how tame it is, is not accepted on the internet. At least not under your real name.
It just takes one person to write a rant and then its all over. Thousands of examples but a similar one was VSCode having to remove the santa hat from an icon on Christmas because someone claimed it was extremely offensive. I know I'm starting to sound like an American conspiracy theorist about the war on christmas, but the reality is that you just can't show any kind of personality, humor, or fun on the internet without putting yourself at risk.
Why not simply allow that person to be offended? Why care? Is it necessary to capitulate to every complainer that shows up and claims your culture is offending them? Just let them complain about the santa hat. Hopefully as far away as possible.
Because one SJW attacts ten more, and those attract a hundred more, then the media joins in, and then people start sending you and your colleagues threatening messages, doxxing you, and otherwise messing with your work and your community. And then instead of writing free software to do good for the world, you spend your time defending yourself from the trash of the world.
So the pragmatic strategy is to surrender early, when the cost of surrender is still small (just your own shame of yielding to evil people).
Or you could just never defend yourself. The people who don't like it will stop using your software. If the criticism was actually reasonable, and you chose to ignore it, maybe that'll backfire on you. If it was unreasonable, it'll blow over; you're not engaging with it, so there's no story.
That works if you're a CEO of a company and don't have shareholders to respond to, or your shareholders also think alike.
If you're a lowly employee with a family, doing some open source or blogging or whatnot on the side, and that side activity attracts the wrath of professional victims? You're suddenly in risk of significantly derailing your life (and that of your family!), possibly damaging it permanently. So you capitulate, just to survive.
This is why you be pseudonymous. If you're a bigot, it doesn't really help you (people will still stop using your stuff, and your pseudonym will gain a bad reputation), but it protects you from short-term reputation hits due to misunderstandings (like this one).
Sure, if you ignore them, and if you're not a big juicy target, the twisted zealots will eventually leave you alone. But who knows how much rot and corruption they will spread before they lose interest? And even if you can handle getting hate mail, or having your name plastered all around the internet with a cross-hair on it, what if it happens to your family, your collaborators, your employees, your employer, your customers?
You're acting like they're evil. They're not hunting for “big juicy targets”; they're trying to solve societal problems, and are working off the model that there are a lot of charismatic abusers out there, so people defending their actions should be treated with incredible suspicion. (In general, that's a bad attitude to have… but the harm of believing an abuser can be pretty high, so I'm not even saying they're wrong to take that stance by default, given how often they need it.)
If you're not charismatic – you don't try to defend yourself – they'll run through their investigation and find something or find nothing, and then give a fairly fair verdict (or as fair as anything on Twitter ever is).
In this case, the author could've engaged, probably, and said something like:
> This was actually meant to be sarcastic; you're meant to notice how unreasonable it is, and disagree with the narrator, but the narrator doesn't represent my views, which are [XYZ]. Your advice would be good, if I actually agreed with what I'd written, but the point is that it's outlandish and bad, because I'm calling out attitudes in the game industry.
> The feature I'm documenting there is usually used for bad. Your suggestions would be good ones, if I actually believed in that bad, but I don't. Do you have any ideas for how to make it more obviously sarcastic?
I think the author probably missed the boat on this, though; the Twitter mob grows quickly.
Lets remind ourselves that the original post in question is simply calling out in app purchases as evil corporate tools for extracting money.
The person who tried to warp this in to a social issue because they didn't like that they were being called out for using IAPs (being an abuser themselves really), is evil. This person is a harm to society.
And then the word gets back to your employer, or your potential future employers. Suddenly you find yourself on thin ice for an indeterminate period of time.
No, thanks. I'd just rather my online persona is squeaky-clean under my real name, and anything controversial (oh, I don't know, like holding even one opinion that's got a potential to become controversial a year or two down the line) is under a pseudonym.
Hope your employer has a strong free-speech culture (how does that even work in the post-Trump era where the term "free speech" is becoming squicky to associate with, I wonder?) or you're self-employed with clients that don't mind SJW outrage.
I watched a YouTube video by somebody who was the target of these attacks and he admitted that he started waking up feeling so numb from stress that he couldn’t move and once soiled his bed because he couldn’t get up. The level of stress and how his business relationships and family members were targeted was unbelievable. You can’t just ignore how offended they get
>Why not simply allow that person to be offended? Why care?
From a business standpoint: They've shown they're willing to make a scene, while simultaneously making it just controversial enough that you can justify pulling it down (and therefore averting the issue) without major loss of face.
In other words, nobody's primary business is controversial documentation.
Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track.
Not a full hit of on-topic, but I appreciate that you quote from the satirical piece in question (and I imagine you got down-voted by people who didn't read the OP, or who had this fly over their head).
Putting the content of the joke aside, humor itself seems to get some kind of strange negative reaction from a subset of people. Even this forum seems to have "sarcasm police" who will attack any joke that isn't properly tagged and licensed. Makes me wonder which comes first, anger at the humor or the subject.
Unless it’s frogs... I think. I genuinely have started to lose track of which offensive memes are sufficiently unique that they still hold power when referring to them by minimalistic descriptions.
The most innocent humour I can think of is a goofy self deprecating slip up or remark. I could see those going out of style because they could be seen as portraying somebody or some group the wrong way, of harming people who suffered bad negative effects from such a slip up like a concussion, or even of fundamentally making fun of disabilities (or any group that “acts funny”).
I guess puns might be immune. We still have puns. Unless some alt right jerk uses them as a way to make fun of Japanese people (there is a stereotype from a while back), then we lose puns too
> I guess puns might be immune. We still have puns.
Except when someone deems the subject too serious (“how dare you make jokes about that”). So no, we don’t still have puns.
What I’d like to know is why the American culture in particular seems so hostile to any form of humour. This isn’t something I have seen in other Western European countries to this extent (though it is spreading in thanks to the Internet).
I like making jokes at myself, but people have complained how even that might scare new joiners (eg. they don't know that when you say "what fool did this code change" that it was you, so they might be scared that this is how we generally talk about others' changes).
Some of those are somewhat valid points, but the trick is to find people who don't mind the humour, and then spend the most time with them :)
> but the reality is that you just can't show any kind of personality, humor, or fun on the internet without putting yourself at risk.
Completely untrue. Lefty "SJW" Twitter is full of humour and personality. Shitposting takes precedence over serious discussion, massively, to the point where more centrist or right-wing twitter circles seem completely dry in comparison. If your humour and personality aren't accepted, that's on you.
It just takes one person to write a rant and then its all over. Thousands of examples but a similar one was VSCode having to remove the santa hat from an icon on Christmas because someone claimed it was extremely offensive. I know I'm starting to sound like an American conspiracy theorist about the war on christmas, but the reality is that you just can't show any kind of personality, humor, or fun on the internet without putting yourself at risk.