2020 refuses to relent!
When the lockdown started in April, thousands of self-proclaimed comedians took to social media to express their generic views on masks, Trump, and Tiger King. But now, the newest blow to mediocre internet comedy has come in the form of the Netflix documentary, “The Social Dilemma.”
Hundreds of social media users have deleted their accounts after watching The Social Dilemma’s horrifying dramatization of a white boy being radicalized by social media to ignore his family and attend a peaceful protest.
Now, even Minneapolis’ biggest satire website, The Terminal Times, is feeling the hurt.
“We don’t know if it’s the algorithm or if people are just tired of hack jokes,” said Terminal Times writer Jacob Nuckolls, “but we now have less engagement than Pilot Pete from the last season of the Bachelor.”
The Times was founded shortly after the Coronavirus lockdown, at a time when jokes were still funny. It soon evolved to become a local satire mammoth that its writers and interns beg their friends to read.
The satire industry is experiencing a bear market due to the recent internet exodus, with inferior sites such as The Onion and The Hard Times going from an average of 12,000 likes per article to about 11,500. Smaller, better sites such as Times are hot on Onion’s tail, but with similar statistics. “4 likes is the new 7,” says co-founder Charlie Settles, “which was previously our record.”
- Jacob Nuckolls, Terminal Times
The Terminal Times 