Corporate takeover of April Fools' Day is such a stupid fucking aspect of modern society.
Pranks are at their best when they punch up, subversively point out the irrationality of existing power structures, or when they have no larger agenda or point. When they give you a moment to remember how absurd everything really is when you think about it.
Treating 4/1 as an excuse for PR departments to find a clever way to push their message just makes me sad.
The only joke I was surprised and chuckled at was the stackoverflow limiting the amount of copy paste. I was annoyed for few seconds and then laughed out loud.
The rest of the jokes are obnoxious, trite, wannabe bandwagons. Maybe it's time corporates ease down on this worn out tradition?
Czech Mapy.cz (part of a big corporation for cz scale) also has a good one (almost) every year. This year they restricted you from browsing more than 10 km from your location and the map went blank after 9 PM, according to current covid restrictions here. Obviously, there was a simple way to escape it.
Sometimes you see an idea so zany that you have trouble even modeling the person who thought it might be a good idea, and went so far as to follow through. This is one of those times, for me.
Doubly so for this. I can't understand how someone could come to the conclusion that 1) customers would think this was funny, and 2) it would improve their brand.
I mean, this is a like an AWS April fools joke where they pretend to loose all your data or something.
Typical tone deaf actions of the privileged. Myself, I would just chuckle and think "yeah right." Ten years ago I would have been in a panic, as someone mentioned previously, this would have been my food money for the month or my house payment and I would have been at thier mercy for a refund. Not appropriate, obviously now.
I'm sure that's just a hypothetical example but just reading that last sentence gave my feelings of anxiety. Of course I have backups, and of course I'm testing them... but still.
Sadly with the amount of “it’s just a joke bro” I see on the Internet, it wasn’t as difficult for me to model the person lacking the necessary scruples to think of this and then immediately think “nah, I better not”
Am the only person who thinks we should not do April Fools anymore? It’s funny when you’re 8 and in school. It’s just become a day of annoying corporate bullshit as an adult.
It was funny in the late 90s. Slashdot would go all wonky, everything was a lie, and it was mostly absurd press releases and wacky scientific "findings". You could say "bah humbug" and stay off the internet and mostly avoid it. Or, you knew what you were getting into after maybe the second headline.
But the voltswagen thing was way too early. Jokes and serious news are mixed on sites like HN. This shit with deliveroo is unthinkable. And all this in a environment where fake news isn't just rampant, it's been weaponized.
Yeah, count me out. It's gone too far. Companies really need to quit it. At least, we could hope that HN could keep this crap off the front page
TL;DR: Since the government authorized facial recognition on security cameras and the mask prevents that, they voted a law to have a QRCode on your mask to enable "facial" recognition
You are not the only person. I would be super happy if we just stopped this thing once and for all. It was kind of funny 20 years ago. It's not anymore.
Just make it extremely clear it's April 1st and do something unusual instead of lying to everyone.
The worst part of April Fools' isn't the spirit, it's the deception and inauthenticity.
I remember one creator on YouTube this year who put it as: "yes, today is April 1st, but what I did is real, not a lie, and it took actual effort to achieve."
There are two ways you could do it. 1) the extreme way. Make it illegal under fraud laws (at least for corporations) or 2) create a non-binding agreement and get companies to commit to it via petition or similar.
I really can’t fathom how this could ever be approved by a brand team or a social media team? There must’ve been several people involved, from the initial planning stages to do something for April fools, to coming up with an idea, to writing copy for it, to sending out the email to customer lists, to briefing customer care teams that it’s a joke and not real. And no one thought “hey, this is a bad idea. There’s a lot of people struggling financially right now, let’s shock them into thinking their account got hacked and they are out a significant amount of money”. How could this even happen? I’m really truly dumbfounded. What was the expectation here? That people would find it funny, to get a scare that they’re out of money, that their personal information was misused? In no scenario does this make deliveroo look good - like ... how did this happen?!?!?
This is hilarious on a meta level. Like, it's funny that a marketing team could be so detached and misanthropic as to think people would find this funny.
Readit News
Pranks are at their best when they punch up, subversively point out the irrationality of existing power structures, or when they have no larger agenda or point. When they give you a moment to remember how absurd everything really is when you think about it.
Treating 4/1 as an excuse for PR departments to find a clever way to push their message just makes me sad.
The rest of the jokes are obnoxious, trite, wannabe bandwagons. Maybe it's time corporates ease down on this worn out tradition?
I mean, this is a like an AWS April fools joke where they pretend to loose all your data or something.
You've got to wonder how people come up with ideas as clearly braindead as this.
Apparently there was one such case.
But the voltswagen thing was way too early. Jokes and serious news are mixed on sites like HN. This shit with deliveroo is unthinkable. And all this in a environment where fake news isn't just rampant, it's been weaponized.
Yeah, count me out. It's gone too far. Companies really need to quit it. At least, we could hope that HN could keep this crap off the front page
Makes me thing about the april fools on LinuxFR[1]
[1] - https://linuxfr.org/news/mise-en-place-du-port-du-masque-ave...
TL;DR: Since the government authorized facial recognition on security cameras and the mask prevents that, they voted a law to have a QRCode on your mask to enable "facial" recognition
Obvious fake news, but funny read anyway.
IKEA sent an email about Hund Couture. They made a little video with dogs dressed in clothes made of IKEA bags. Amusing. Hurts no one.
Sending someone a fake bill that looks real isn’t really funny. I’m not even sure what that is.
The worst part of April Fools' isn't the spirit, it's the deception and inauthenticity.
I remember one creator on YouTube this year who put it as: "yes, today is April 1st, but what I did is real, not a lie, and it took actual effort to achieve."
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Unfunny. Not even smart.
EDIT:
Here's a guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkKs2LgF6qc