I personally enjoy your satire, I think I’ve even commented on a few of your “not Chad mctruth” shitposts. It does scare me as an early member of boards like r9k in my childhood though. It’s hard to tell the satirists and the shitposters from the actual bigots and true believers, and myself and some of the other dinosaurs on the internet have watched in real time as communities that started like yours turned into the online alt right. I think you would do well to clearly label it as satire; I know it takes away slightly from your intended audience, but I think it’s more important to make it clear to anybody who doesn’t get it that the ideas you are presenting are the ideas of clowns and are to be mocked.

For the second time today, I’m reminded of The Onion’s amicus brief for Novak v. City of Parma. My unsolicited advice is that if you are going to engage in an act of parody, make sure a reasonable reader can figure it out.

It’s worth reading the entire thing.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/20221003125252896_35295545_1-22.10.03 - Novak-Parma - Onion Amicus Brief.pdf

But if any of you all want a summary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novak_v._City_of_Parma#The_Onion’s_amicus_brief

There’s a lot of negativity in here and I want to share a different perspective.

First of all, it is extremely, overwhelmingly obvious that your posts are satire. Looking through your posts, I found it basically impossible to imagine thinking you were serious, even if I had agreed with the things you were saying.

Second, all of the criticism here seems to be about how folks are sensitive when it comes to stuff about modern politics. That’s understandable - a fresh wound will be sensitive, after all. But I think that “this kind of humor makes me feel bad about the world” is the sort of use case the block button was made for. A better argument against what you’re doing would be that you’re causing harm, doing things like radicalizing people or antagonizing oppressed groups, which I haven’t seen anyone argue that you’re doing. (If anyone here believes that chad is causing harm, I’m open to having my mind changed, but you’d have to explain why.) I don’t think “this isn’t how I want to react to awful politics” is a reason to make you stop what I’m sure is a cathartic exercise on your end.

At least 50% of effective satire is timing. Yours is way, way off.

People don’t need a ‘satire’ tag, they just don’t need this type of satire at all right now.

Look, I get committing to a bit. I’ve been banned for it before

But this one? Just don’t. It’s too hard to get right, and the consequences of getting it wrong are too much.

Let it go. Maybe in a few years, it would work. But right now? Nah, just nah.

And, that’s coming from someone that is 100% in the “you can joke about anything” camp. And you can. But you gotta read the room, and the joke has to work without needing to explain it’s a joke. It’s like Carlin said, it’s about the exaggeration, how you twist reality and flip it.

Your gag isn’t working. It falls flat. It’s just one more thing to deal with when the world is too fucking close to that shit happening again. Satire wouldn’t help even if it was executed perfectly on a much bigger platform.

You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do, but this just suck.

I agree with the shared sentiment here. Satire is great, and it has its place, but when the things the people you are satirizing are saying are on par with your satire, it’s just depressing. Like, I can understand things being a joke, but it isn’t funny if all it does is remind me of how, without the context, it would be impossible to tell by glancing if this was actually stuff said by these kinds of people. The joke falls flat when the joke is so close to reality, that it’s just a reminder of how awful people truly are. I understand that people deal with trauma and misery through humor, but this is such a strongly sensitive topic, that the jokes about it in this capacity (at least with this execution) aren’t funny. They’re simply depressing. So personally, regardless of the satirical nature, I’m not going to go out and defend that community. There are plenty of people out there who wouldn’t even think it’s satire, and it could simply feed the cycle of hate they’re a part of. I draw the line on humor when it can be used to fuel the very thing it’s making fun of. The reliance on people being aware enough to understand that it’s satire is a big flaw to me, especially given how widespread this kind of thinking is, and how close your satire is to the reality.

Just my two cents.

This is waaaay too soon to be funny.

Any attempts at satire mimicing current politics will just be depressing. The politicians you’re making fun of end up unironically repeating the satire, bar for bar, in a way that is worse that anyone could have imagined. Your community is pushing that line a bit too far. Personally, it’s not even that I had to question whether it’s satire, but rather that I knew 100% that it’s satire while also realizing that someone in the White House would totally and unironically agree with some of it.

Honestly, “NotTheOnion” communities have crazier, more out-of-pocket headlines than The Onion now, and I don’t think it’s even that close. IMO charged satire like that community, even if it’s making fun of bad people, needs a break until reality gets less chaotic. Maybe in the future this will be something we can all just “laugh off” with jokes but right now things are way more serious than that for a lot of people and these attempts at dark satire just make that worse for them even when it’s obviously a joke.