And One Clown

<th3no0b> Im going to be the next hitler
<th3no0b> Im going to kill all the jews and 1 clown
<rageagainsttheamish> why the clown
<th3no0b> See? no one cares about the jews
<rageagainsttheamish>lmao

-Quote #171987

Procrastinating for a bit and skimming Facebook. I realised I have a weird tendency to " Like" someone's comment even if I only liked one small part of it - though I guess that is the point of the "Like" function, to get you to interact with the site even if you're only reading briefly, so that hopefully you will stay longer and it can flash more ads at you. For instance, a friend of mine mentioned something that she her plans were for today(which was obviously so important to me that I can't even remember what it was), and at the end, she said that she was going to watch the third season of The I.T Crowd.

My cursor hovered over the "Like" button, but one of the other things I hate about liking someone's status is that because of my settings, every time someone comments on that status, I get an email with what they said, and most of the time, I can't even remember what the original comment was, so I end up having to log back into Facebook to check (again, probably another one of the reasons for the function). Instead, I clicked the "View all x comments" button, and read the comments. A lot of them were people commenting that they also liked The I.T Crowd.

I wonder if I could change my status to something with a completely outrageous statement, but have something at the end like "I just saw the new Harry Potter movie and it was awesome!!!!!!!!!!" (although arguably, some people may believe that is outrageous) whether people would comment on the outrageous thing or mention Harry Potter?

Joanna linked this article describing someone's experiment to try to find Facebook's algorithm for deciding which news items to show you. I always wondered why I would click on someone's Facebook profile to see what they've been up to lately, and see an entire wall full of status updates that never entered my news feed. Strangely enough, MrMan5.5 is never on my news feed, despite the fact that we are listed as being in a relationship together on Facebook. Something weird going on there! Maybe Facebook just assumes that I know everything going on in his life because we're together, and so I don't need to be updated with his status on my news feed. But if that were true, then you'd never get comments like this - though I do check MrMan5.5's profile every now and again to see if people have tagged him in photos from ages ago, so sometimes I comment on his status even though it doesn't appear in my news feed, but I am usually late to the party. =(

Anyway, back to the one clown. I'm trying to think of what kind of thing would be the most likely to cause people to focus on it. The one clown example works because the addition of "and one clown" causes confusion - how is the clown related to the Jews? Is there something about Jews that makes clowns important to them? Is the person saying Jews are clowns? Did Hitler hate Clowns? Whichever question is the first to pop into your head, it invariably leads to the question, "Why the clown?" which is what makes it work.

I thought the Harry Potter statement would work, because it's not entirely implausible to make it seem like a sarcastic comment, and I know a lot of people who like Harry Potter, though maybe I should wait until the next Twilight movie, because a lot of people seem very vocal about their opinions about Twilight, and will probably end up arguing about that and completely ignoring whatever else I said.

So the next part is, what can I say on Facebook that won't completely damage my "e-reputation", but will be shocking enough that I can make a "nobody cares about the Jews" comment? This is a huge can of worms, which I think deserves a post on its own, so I'll leave it at that. Suggestions, anyone?