April Fools' Is Cancelled (2014) - CoRecursive Podcast

Adam: Hello, this is CoRecursive and I'm Adam Gordon Bell. Today on April 1st, 2014, something interesting happened. Hacker News moderator Dan G, or dang, he made the following post. Challenge: Keep lame April Fools' jokes off the front page. Most April Fools' gags are lame. Only the very best ones that show some sort of ingenuity deserve attention. I propose that we, or rather you, flag these jokes so they don't end up on the front page. Dang wasn't the first person to complain about the lameness of tech company April Fools' Day jokes, but I think to the various developers and tech company people hanging out on Hacker News, dang's statement was a really big one. It kind of marked the end of this era of companies dropping these big jokes on April Fools'. So today in our first This Day in History Segment, I want to share some of history not just of April Fools', but of tech pranks in general, all leading up to that sort of cancellation statement by dang, and even right up to today actually. Why were pranks and April Fools' jokes traditionally celebrated in tech, and why are they now considered as dang said, "lame?" And here to talk about those pranks, I have my frequent co-host and developer extraordinaire, possible neighbor, Don McKay, and also my favorite PhD candidate and mathematician, Krystal Maughan. Why don't you guys say hello? Krystal: Hi, I'm happy to be here! I would challenge your assumption that they died on that day. I think we very much still see them today and they're just as an annoying today as they were in 2014. Krystal: I really like them because for me, getting into tech in general was through things like Hackerspaces and DEFCON, maybe some of these jokes flop, but when they're great, they're really funny. And I think that those kind of things should be encouraged as long as they're not necessarily malicious. That's the goal, but the reality is that everybody tries to do it and not everybody's good at it.