The Internet is great, but like all things… it has its blemishes. These are those blemishes.
8. Youtube Videos
Yea, it may be arguable that Youtube is the father of everything on this list, but it also allows me to hear music and watch old cartoons so to be fair I put Youtube very high on this list. Now when I say Youtube is sad, I am not saying it doesn’t have some truly funny videos, but most of the top watched videos are of people getting hurt or failing at something. For example let me read off some of the most watched Youtube Videos: Numa Numa, Star Wars Kid, Don’t Tase Me Bro, Chocolate Rain. Now what makes these videos so appealing to us? It’s not because they are funny, it’s because they all fail so hard it makes us feel better about ourselves. There are over 120,000,000 million Youtube videos today, and arguably under a 100 “quality” videos. If you do the math that’s under .0000008%. Once you get under the thin microscopic layer of sad but amusing videos you are left with even sadder examples of humanity. Do a search for Home Improvement tributes and you are bombarded with thousands and thousands of montages set to Celine Deon. Things on Youtube that aren’t popular don’t get monitored as closely, which allows really creepy things to be on there. If you want an idea of what I am talking about do a search for Simpsons fan tributes, and gaze at the horror before you. Youtube is only good at showing at how sad our society really is, and that’s why it is on this list.
7. Chuck Norris “Jokes”
Maybe just maybe one time four years ago I chuckled at a Chuck Norris joke, but after that first introduction to the Chuck Norris joke I was bombarded with reused joke after joke. What started as a stupid joke in a forum somewhere has now spawned a phenomenon. People from the biggest nerd to your own grandma use Chuck Norris jokes. It’s time to let this one go people here let me show you a graph as to why.
As you can see the Chuck Norris joke went through the natural progression of a joke, and now needs to go the same way as every joke, and die. I would almost make the argument it was never funny, just a random non sequitur. You are probably asking if it isn’t funny then why are there T-Shirts and books? By the time it took for Chuck Norris Jokes to get into the consumer culture they stopped being funny and just started being ironically funny, but more importantly just sad. If you actually wear one of these shirts and you are older then 12 there is seriously something wrong with your sense of humor and you need to grow up.
6. Farmville
Imagine you just came back from school, and you sit down at the computer and the first thing you do is click over and over and do a repetitive task for fake money. It doesn’t sound too attractive, but that is just what thousands of people do everyday when they sit down to play Farmville. Maybe I just have too short of an attention span to understand Farmville, but the way I see it is people who spend hours making virtual money to plant fake crops just so they can make that money back and all the while collecting lonely black cows. Maybe I am missing something, but to me all it seems like is that people are using their time on the internet to waste time on a virtual crappy job. Farmville is so sad it’s gotten to a point where people are paying other people to tend their “crops” when they go on vacations. That’s just lunacy, Farmville is madness in a 6 by 6 window.
So much fun!
When people are doing online chores that they don’t want to do in real life something has gone terribly ary.
5. World of Warcraft
When people prostitute themselves out for game loot that’s when you know something is wrong. 11.5 million people play World of Warcraft, and I don’t know what is worse, that statistic or the fact that people have to pay a monthly fee to give up their social life. World of Warcraft has gotten so big that they actually have rehab centers for people who can’t quit playing. When it gets to a point when your are playing a game so much that you need to get professional help to quit, there is no other word besides sad. World of War is just a game. People need to stop playing this game and get on with their lives.
4. Rickrolling
Rickrolling started in who knows when, but it needs to stop now. What started as a lame joke has evolved into something bigger than anyone could imagine. It’s something akin to the blob of internet memes or the pink slime in Ghostbusters 2, once it got going it fed of the annoyance it causes others. The fact that Rickrolling exists actually says less for the man then it does for Rickrolling itself. This “phenomenon” started due to the fact that people found it was funny to mess with others. It’s actually pretty crazy when you think about. If someone was going to use Rick Rolling as an example for the downfall of man I would 100% agree with them. Rickrolling has gone from being a solely internet based thing to a national crazy that accumulated in 2008 when Rick Astley Rickrolled the entire Macy Thanksgiving day parade. Also the point of a Rickroll is sad. Usually a Rickroll is done in a link to something else, it originated prior to the release of Grand Theft Auto 4, when someone on somethingawful.com posted a link to new GTA screenshots but it turned out to be a link to a Youtube video of “Never going to give you up” by Rick Astley. Since then it has caused mild inconviences for people all around the world, but key word being mild because our browsers all have a handy dandy back button.
3. Blogs
I am tired of blogs being talked about and being taken too seriously. Blogs are just an outlet for failed news reporters. People literally post stuff from what they think about issue X, to what they had for lunch. It’s sad because no one really cares. There are literally thousands of people out there who have a book blog, that don’t get more then 2 hits a month, yet they constantly publish post after post like they matter. I don’t know what makes it sadder the fact that people publish it so often or the fact that so many people have blogs.
2. Lolcats
One of the first things to be spawned from the internet is Lolcats. For those who do not know what Lolcats are, they are mildly humorous pictures of cats with a caption.
Adorable and endearing Lolcats has done something that only World of Warcraft has accomplished and that is turning people crazy. Lolcats, with it’s horrible misspellings, has done something that very few internet memes can boast: launched a wiki project to translate the entire bible into Lolcats. Here is a tiny excerpt from Genesis Lolcat style.
“At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz. An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin. An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1”
If you can’t decipher that exerpt from the Bible it’s when on the seventh day their was light. The obsession people have with Lolcats is scary. People have saved and created millions and millions of pictures of Lolcats. One man even bought a 120 gig external hard drive just to hold all his Lolcats. I can appreciate Lolcats, but when people take it too far that upsets me.
1. Shock Sites
I really don’t have much to say about this as it is kind of self explanatory. For those who don’t know, a shock site is usually a disturbing image of something or someone. It can range from someone dying to something simply disgusting. The fact that people visit these sites to see these things is a horrible thought.