ED... I don't get it D:

[spiritcreations]

And no, I'm not talking about erectile dysfunction. I'm talking about the Encyclopedia Dramattica. I really don't get this thing and why people think it is so funny. Is it actually *meant* to just be a funny joke and to laugh at yourself, or is it actual hateful people that are so beyond retarded and bored in their life that they need to sit around

Comments

[feyala]

It's a little of column A, a little of column B. I do find some of the things hilarious - particularly the bits where somebody has a bloated ego, only to have their ass handed to them. The stories associated with this article for example, make me lol. The insect battle is legendary on ConceptArt and I wouldn't have known about it without this article, because I don't hang around there often enough. If you go to a site like CA with actual professional artists, and pretend you are god's gift even though you have crappy anatomy skills and no firm grasp of even the basics of composition, you deserve to get your ass handed to you, IMO. The best parts of that story are on the CA forums, of course, not ED, but ED links to it to make it easy to find.

The other thing I find entertaining is the meme category, where I can find out way more than I ever wanted to know about the latest catchphrases that I might see spouted randomly or perhaps have never even heard of.

I am all for publically denouncing shitty behavior as a form of shaming in some circumstances, but I agree that many of the articles on specific people are mean-spirited and spiteful, born only of an interest in bringing the person down by any pitiful/desperate means the person can come up with. Sometimes it brings a person's real life into it and alienates their parents, peers, friends, etc - I have seen cases where people's real phone numbers and addresses are disseminated so the hordes of anonymous can come crashing down on them. In this way it is much like the internet vigilantes of China, and while in some cases it seems appropriate (exposing child molesters for example), in many cases it is overkill due to personal grievances with a thin veneer of "lol just kidding", and I'm not sure I like where that particular slope takes us.

Since ED is a lot like Wikipedia and there is no one author for every page, the content varies greatly from informative and hilarious to obvious trite shit-stirring depending on what pages you are looking at. I think it is useful for some things, but it seems like especially lately more of the hate-filled pages are multiplying.