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tf2.com

L13: Stunning Member
Jun 16, 2010
1,186
712
You may have heard that Reddit bought Team Fortress 2 today. We can officially confirm that this is in fact the case. So if any Reddit staffers are reading this: Hi, boss! We're working pretty hard over here. Well, back to work.


Okay, the Reddit guys've probably stopped reading by now, so we can be square with you: Reddit only thinks it bought us, because that's what we told them when we met them over the weekend to sign all the legal documents. What they don't know is that when a bird flew into a window during the signing and everybody on the TF2 team got scared and some of us started crying, that was a little something we in the business world call a distraction.


The "bird" that "flew" into the window? Not a bird at all. It was a squirrel launched from a t-shirt cannon by one of our guys across the street. The part where we got "scared"? Daniel Day Lewis-level method acting by the TF2 team. The part where some of us started "crying"? That was because the sound of the squirrel hitting the glass was a lot louder than we thought it would be and was legitimately scary. So technically real, but still under the umbrella of our overall deception.


Once the Reddit guys were thoroughly distracted, we took advantage of them awkwardly trying to avoid eye contact with us and switched the legal documents for new documents. Documents that said we actually secretly bought them. Business.


In celebration of our Reddit purchase, we're going to add some new Reddit-themed items to the game. There's also plenty of neat stuff we're working on and would love to tease. But realistically, because today is the International Day of Foolishness, anything we told you guys would just be met with suspicion. And when have we ever trolled our community? Never, that's when. Okay, maybe that one time.




Source: TF2.com
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,776
7,674
Reddit is virtually unusuable today because of the amount of dynamic "randomly acquired item" induced nonsense clogging up pages. I try to look at a comment page and it locks up for 10 seconds and then I get script-not-responding prompts.
 

EArkham

Necromancer
aa
Aug 14, 2009
1,625
2,774
Ditto. I hate the internet on April Fool's day. It wouldn't be so bad if it were actually clever jokes or pranks, but it's almost always "lolololz, our site is unusable today due to our poorly thought out 'joke'".
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,776
7,674
Yea, sure, maybe if you only look at the default subs where the majority of the stupid userbase resides, but reddit is not a single community. Reddit is simply a cross-section sample of the internet as a whole, and a catch-all label like that doesn't help anything.
 

LeSwordfish

semi-trained quasi-professional
aa
Aug 8, 2010
4,101
6,597
Even poking around in the small friendly ones reveals plenty of shitbirds.

And I've said this before, but saying "reddit is fine as long as you stay out of the defaults"* is a little like saying "this is my house, never go in the living room, never, I think it's waist-deep right now, look, don't ask, come with me to the kitchen there's barely any seepage."

*subreddits that are not defaults: mensrights, seduction, creepshots, jailbait, trueatheism, terwonickland.
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,776
7,674
Except it's more like an apartment complex, because each sub is self-governed.
...Meh, I'm not exactly trying to defend it or the shitbirds. The problem really is just the sheer scale of the userbase. I guess what it comes down to is that I simply find it a useful site to collect a lot of my minor interests in one place that I wouldn't otherwise make the effort or have the time to find individual sites to be involved in.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,701
2,583
Morally defensible or not, Reddit is for people who can't be assed to find real fan communities and just want to go to the most obvious centralized place that everyone's heard of, where whoever gets "dibs" on the name of a thing gets to run the only fan community on the site.

It's like Facebook for the Internet-savvy-enough-to-know-that-sites-other-than-Facebook-exist crowd.
 

Crash

func_nerd
aa
Mar 1, 2010
3,349
5,524
Or people looking for specific groups of people without joining another community for something that could be a minor hobby/ interest. I think this shit is hilarious but I'm not going to go sign up to another site for it.

"Real fan communities" like the direct forums tied to a show or game tend to be some of the worst communities online, in my experience. Look at almost any big video game's forums. The Steam community comes to mind. I would think this would be the more obvious centralized place most people would think of, anyway.
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,776
7,674
By "interests" I'm not even talking about fan communities for video games or the like.

I like knowing the how and why of things I do, and I like cooking, so stuff like r/AskCulinary has proved educational and interesting to me. However I don't actually get around to cooking very often so I'm not about to go find a cooking forum to visit every day (which may or may not actually get into the chemistry of it).

Similar to what Crash said, I subbed to r/Pareidolia as soon as I found it just because I've experienced that so much myself, especially in mapping (mirrored textures on corners). It's absolutely pointless and dumb, but those couple things a day make me smile.

Hating on reddit because of the outward publicized appearance is like not going to Chicago for the museums because they have a high murder rate, or avoiding New Jersey because of Jersey Shore.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,701
2,583
"Real fan communities" like the direct forums tied to a show or game tend to be some of the worst communities online, in my experience. Look at almost any big video game's forums. The Steam community comes to mind. I would think this would be the more obvious centralized place most people would think of, anyway.

For the record I mostly hate the idea of "official" fan forums also, on the principle that creators generally shouldn't set themselves up as being in charge of their fandoms. (Especially when those fandoms turn out to be worse than the thing they're fans of, which is always.) One of the first forums I ever joined was a fan-created forum for a webcomic. When I later found out that it almost never works that way, I was like "...Whaaaat? Why?"
 

Shovel-Head

L1: Registered
Jan 22, 2013
14
6
It would've been a bigger shitstorm, (and therefore more hilarious) if it was a 4Chan hat.
 

Freyja

aa
Jul 31, 2009
3,011
5,839
And I've said this before, but saying "reddit is fine as long as you stay out of the defaults"* is a little like saying "this is my house, never go in the living room, never, I think it's waist-deep right now, look, don't ask, come with me to the kitchen there's barely any seepage."

No. It's like saying you shouldn't go onto the internet because of the scamming, the trolls and the 4chan. And yet here we all are.
 

GPuzzle

L9: Fashionable Member
Feb 27, 2012
638
414
No. It's like saying you shouldn't go onto the internet because of the scamming, the trolls and the 4chan. And yet here we all are.
Internet in a nutshell!