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The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

(oldvcr.blogspot.com)
511 points goldenskye | 1 comments | 01 Apr 25 07:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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glimshe ◴[01 Apr 25 12:11 UTC] No.43545801[source]▶
Hot take: workplace and social media April Fools jokes aren't funny and are often inappropriate and disrespectful to people's time.

It's cool to do these to your friends in High school, but I once wasted a good amount of time at work because of an April's fool joke. I already didn't want to do the work so I got really upset to have wasted time doing something boring and useless.

Additionally, the scale of social media can create situations where it wastes everybody's time several times per day... Including on HN.

Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.

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1. xxr ◴[01 Apr 25 15:44 UTC] No.43548172[source]▶
Y’know, I’m inclined to agree here, but I don’t think it was always this way. Over the last few years I’ve been feeling really fatigued, I suppose, by April Fool’s Day, and I think feeling this way has coincided with the rise of fake everything on the web. Rather than one day a year where we get to be amused by pranks in good faith, we’re mentally on-guard every day trying to identify whether a story or (increasingly) an image is real or not. Rather than one day a year where you’ve got people sending you stuff like “ALIEN LABORATORY DISCOVERED UNDERNEATH PYRAMIDS” accompanied by obvious-to-you GenAI images, now it’s every day, and still not everyone is in on the joke (and a joke is the best-case scenario behind creator’s intent).