Why do people like xkcd

Who cars, they are just jokes. Just some dude telling jokes, not really even worth my comment time wich makes me wonder: Why even press the "post comment" button? It's Rob's way of pointing out that this whole website should be taken with a heavy dose of irony. Except the popularity of xkcdsucks isn't entirely based on its inside jokes.

I'm not sure about the inside joke thing either. I found XKCD funny when I first started reading it the older ones without really knowing any 'inside jokes'. Now it's definitely less funny, but I don't think it's because it relies on inside jokes.

Out of the last, say, five comics Ok, the R2D2 one I'm not sure what the hell it relies on, but I don't think it's an inside joke, just not a joke at all. The rest are all perfectly understandable by someone who's heard of maths, board games, sex dice and lie detectors, which practically everyone has.

Just attach "And this is my counterpart, R2-D2" to the end of any self-introduction. Don't read too much into it. Interesting point Rob. Much of humor is based on observation and people can observe the things in xkcd comics on a daily basis which makes them easy to reference which makes them kind of a inside joke to readers.

I also find many of the comics funny. Life is too short to waste on things you don't enjoy. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time.

I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc. I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic though it once was.

Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world. I think Carl made a post about this a while back, but Carl is always wrong about literally everything he ever says and I am always demonstrably correct, so I thought I'd give this a go. This one is dedicated to my fans, who complain that my posts are too long and ask if I have nothing better to do.

Written early on a Saturday morning during a bout of insomnia. I used to like XKCD. Like, a lot. I was embarrassingly fanboyish about some of the comics. Unlike many cuddlefish, however, I was willing to engage in intelligent, reasonable discussion, and quickly found that many of the comics were indefensible. At first it went something like "well, he's having an off week. As is so often the case with this scenario, there's no one moment or one thing that swayed me.

But in the space of a few weeks, I went from apologist to hater. The problem isn't just that Randall stopped being talented, though, and often the posts here focus on what makes an individual comic so bad. This often misses the broader picture, and is part of why I started writing these posts in the first place.

There is more than simply the details we point out, and it is in some ways part of XKCD's entire corpus. It is also why I used to like it. The problem is basically this: Randall does not write jokes, as such. You see, Randall is synonymous with XKCD, far more than any other webcomic is synonymous with its creators.

In almost every other comic--and I am including here Overcompensating , despite its function as a journal comic--there is a break between the creator and the created. There is none with XKCD. Perhaps it is the stick figure style, the fact that it started as doodles and notes he never really intended to share with anyone.

But this is why the Megan thing feels so creepy--a phenomenon that I maintain would not happen with other webcomics--and this is why XKCD is so irritating. I first truly noticed this phenomenon with the Tautology comic. Members on the forums started coming up with their own "tautologies" based on this.

This appears to be fanboyish behavior, but I was unconvinced that this alone was to blame, because I was struck with how similar this looked to your garden variety inside joke. Any social circle has inside jokes, and most social circles have at least one person who is the constant source of them. They are generally not, strictly speaking, funny of their own right, but to the social circle, it provides amusement which is derived almost entirely from being part of the ingroup.

It goes something like this: While getting coffee with his friends, an idea strikes a central charismatic figure for something that amuses him--an observation about something fairly mundane in the world.

He mentions this to his friends, who agree that this is amusing, and come up with other examples. The next several minutes of conversation consist of coming up with and discussing examples, and picking favorites.

If the idea is particularly memorable, or if it strikes the fancy of the central figure--if he really fixates on it--then this will become more than just an evening of conversation.

It will become an inside joke. It will be a little game they play, where they come up with examples for each other. This explains XKCD fairly well, but it does not, at first, seem to explain the proselytizing.

However, one must recall that many social circles try to include other people in their inside jokes. They make them around others, they explain the origin stories. This feels validating.

It's a form of social bonding. Except with XKCD, the ingroup is essentially the entirety of internet culture--or rather, this is what they perceive themselves to be. XKCD is an inside joke for everyone who is into the internet; its fans do not see it as a comic but as a source of inside jokes--they are part of a massive social circle with Randall as its central charismatic figure, but which, they tell themselves on the forums, is filled with very excellent and very intelligent people. This also helps to explain the utter shock that some XKCD fans demonstrate towards someone disliking the comic.

If you express dislike for a central figure in any social circle they will react with confusion--this is not only someone they personally like, but someone who is at the core of their social lives and those of several other people. To be in that social circle and yet dislike its core is nothing short of baffling. The problem that I have with this arrangement is not the community as such--I appreciate the internet's potential for community formation--and it is not the fact that inside jokes are not actually funny--every social circle has them and they can be quite enjoyable.

No, it is that this community, this feeling of being part of an ingroup, this sense that the ingroup is the entire internet, is a ruse.

The XKCD fans think that everyone is part of the group or would gladly join it if they somehow missed out. They act as if the whole internet is their community, casually drop references or links whenever something that reminds them of one of their corpus of inside jokes pops up, and then act hurt or confused when you tell them you don't like XKCD.

Randall Munroe is not their friend. In all likelihood he will never be. And so they try to proselytize and seek members for a community which does not exist, never once pausing to analyze their motives here, but always congratulating themselves for being part of such a wonderful community.

And Randall Munroe cheerfully continues the deception, writing things with a formula that's pretty easy to repeat, inside-joke style, and writing about an array of things such that every member of his ingroup will have an opportunity to repeat the injokes. It is built entirely on a false premise and devotion to a concept that isn't even real.

Posted by rs. Anonymous March 6, at AM. Sunshine March 6, at AM. You can see those cultural forces playing out. Like, for the last 10 years or so, there have been more babies named Brooklyn than Sarah, which blows my mind because I knew, like, 20 Sarahs. And then I also talk about how nuclear testing leaves radioactive particles in your teeth. So it was a fun chapter.

But yeah, you were saying, when you talk to creators And in the early s, it was not radical to feel that way about the internet. But this is all context for asking, do you have a take on the evolution of online communities? It feels like xkcd is broadly optimistic about the potential of the internet, but how has that played out for you personally?

I think there are certainly some things that I was optimistic about that then turned into And then other things were things that I was really upset and worried about, or mad about, that now look like the only good ones.

Like, Oh wow, if only we could have kept having it that good. Maybe we were too hard on that guy. That just really rubs me the wrong way. When people are like, People are stupid. Most people can be trusted. But fundamentally, I really believe most people can be trusted, most people are good. I really do think we need our norms to catch up to where we can respond to this kind of stuff better, and we can build systems that are more robust in these ways.

And I feel anxious and urgent about it. It was everywhere; it flooded email. So I dunno. We need to figure that out. I agree with technology critic Michael Sacasas , who wrote earlier today :. Que sera, sera: Whatever will be, will be. Hands off! No need to talk about any technologies at all, or anything they bring about. Just let them wash over you. But within two generations of living memory a technology debuted that greatly diminished the role of oil-painted portraiture.

We have cameras and photography now. And within one generation of living memory, the nature of entertainment was changed by technology. And then I'd get a project and start working on that -- and I found that, instead of it taking up more of my time, I had more comic ideas per day and was drawing more of them. So they all reinforced each other. The format would definitely make sense as a book.

But for the moment, it's just been so much fun to write and answer. My experience of the Internet has been that if you make something really cool, the neatness speaks for itself.

And that's much more important than trying to make something marketable -- trying to make something into a product. So I just found that if I'm steadily trying to make cool things and putting them up, some of them, in some way or another, have a business opportunity. Is there a direct relationship between xkcd and What If?

Do they inspire each other? Mostly, I just think it's helped me because it's given me all this cool stuff to read through. I'll sometimes be researching a question and then be like, "I don't think I can turn that into a thing. And it probably made me annoying! I read this book once about this guy, A. Jacobs, who read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and wrote about the experience. He said he had the problem where someone would be like, "Pass the salt," and he'd be like, "Oh, did you know that salt was originally used in medicine for this kind of thing, and then we learned it causes this?

I had something similar. When I was doing the money chart, someone would say, "Oh, I can't afford to move into a new apartment," and I'd say, "Oh, I know, a lot of people are in that situation because the income has changed like this, whereas the rents in this state have shifted more than in other states, because blahblahblahblahblah -- all these economics.

It was like, "Okay, wait. Pull back. This is not interesting. I learned very early on in life that not everyone wants to hear every fact in the world, even if you want to tell them everything you've ever read. Which is why it's probably good that I have the comic schedule that I do -- because I would figure out something to say every 30 minutes if I were forced to by my schedule.

But it would not be the most interesting. How does the weekly schedule of xkcd and What If play into that? Is it a way of forcing yourself to create with regularity? If there's one thing I've learned from drawing xkcd, it's that I need a strict schedule. Some people who publish comics will just write whenever they have a good idea and put things up, without a regular update schedule.

If I did that, I would never post anything. I have to have that deadline pressure to make me pick something. And that was part of why I hesitated with the question-answering site, and part of why I picked it out of all the things I could have done a blog about -- because I knew that the questions were going to make me want to answer them anyway. What about your work environment?

Where do you actually do your research and your drawing? For a long time, I was working from home. Once I got married, I started working from an office. I found that having somewhere to go that isn't my house is mentally helpful: "This is the place where I answer email and write blog posts," and "over there is the place where I do the dishes.

There are a lot of people who have written books about creativity that I haven't read, so I'm not by any means an expert on it, but my impression is that being creative is just a combination of getting new stimulus, but also having periods where you're not getting any stimulus.

I had to stop reading Reddit sometime a few years ago, because I found that whenever I'd bump into a problem that was going to take a little time to solve, I'd just switch over and refresh Reddit and distract myself. Depriving myself of that has definitely been an important part of actually getting anything done, ever.

But at the same time, if you're just staring at your room with no Internet or no connection, you just go crazy and don't have anything to give you any ideas at all.