InJoke

When you have an eight-year-old community of over 50,000 members and many more readers, you build up a good amount of common history and in-jokes. Some ubiquitous injokes, alphabetized for the sake of some kind of order, are:

• "." (The Period) - The reason people place a period as the sole content of their comment is usually to denote a moment of silence. Not really a joke, but certainly a bit of MeFi slang.

• ___Filter. Not a reference to the multiple other MeFi-workalike or MeFi-related websites, but a reference to MetaFilter being taken over by a single topic. Lately this has been IraqFilter, but more generally it's a reflection of the NewsFilter problem.

• [NOT -IST] Editorial note, after stating your honest views, that you are not something-ist, usually not racist. The original usage by stavrosthewonderchicken [in this MetaTalk comment] used paretheses, not square brackets. Don't miss his epic comment on Korean culture directly above the InJoke inspiring one linked here.

• "1) Brief idea... 2) ????.... 3) Profit": Implies that a business plan or idea is badly thought out. The in-joke seems to have moved over from SlashDot. Derived from the [Underpants Gnomes] episode of South Park.

• 9622?

• Acronyms. MetaFilter specific acronyms you should know.

• "administrator! please hope me!!!" Sometimes used by older MeFi members in a time of need; [see original post]

• [Beverage Spewing]. Trite exaggeration of laughter.

• HurfDurf

• "I, for one, welcome our new subject of post overlords." e.g. if the post was about pancakes, acceptable usage would be, "I, for one, welcome our new pancake overlords." Since many people ask, the origin is Kent Brockman in the Simpsons episode [Deep Space Homer]. MattHaughey officially disapproves of this in-joke. [MeTa thread] and [further explanation of in-joke's origin]

• "I just don't know." Pops up occasionally in threads, seemingly out of context. It is almost never commented on. Who started it? I just dont know.

• "Is this 'X' something you need a Y to have heard of?" Originated in [this post by mischief], when he asserted that he didn't know who Janeane Garofalo was because he didn't own a television.

• MiguelCardoso

• Mushrooms (a reference to an incredibly contentious, lengthy, and ultimately silly undeleted thread)

• "Nader Nader Nader". During the 2000 US Presidential race, MetaFilter was inundated with threads discussing Ralph Nader's third-party candidacy, though he never drew more than single-digit support in polls. The InJoke today would probably be "NaderFilter?". Also see DeanFilter.

• Pancakes (people tend to post things like "who here likes pancakes?" when they find a post stupid)

• PepsiBlue (posts that appear to be an advertising shill)

• PlateOfBeans During intense discussions on MetaFilter, users are sometimes accused of overthinking a plate of beans.

• Plo Chops - just say it in an Arnold Schwarznegger accent. (Blow Jobs)

• Ponies (people tend to ask for ponies on MeTa whilst asking for particularly improbable feature requests)

• [quoting SCIENCE] can be noted in an effort to make feigned outrage that much more outrageous ([you DELETED them?]), or can be used to denote tongue-in-cheek spurious statistics.

• "So this subject of post, it vibrates?" There were so many attempts to post the news story about the Harry Potter vibrating broomstick, it became an InJoke. Also recently spotted as "So this subject of post, it verb?"

• [Sorry MetaFilter, there is no spoon.]

• [summary quotes], which are taught in [livejournalism school], can be used either to call out a quote as invalid, or to invalidate a quote one makes for the sake of hilariousness.

• Taglines. If you look at MetaFilter's logo in the top left corner of every page, you'll see a tagline (on this wiki, we stole 'weblog as conversation'). Posters often like to create new taglines depending on the situation. [See a vast collection of MetaFilter taglines].

• "This is probably bad news for insert name here." [Example], [origin]. [aznblader] links to a scanned and posted book, "The New Soldier," containing Vietnam-era antiwar material, believing the cover photograph depicts Presidential candidate John Kerry. The cover does not, and the mocking is merciless (even extending to aznblader's personal blog comments), instantly spawning a new joke. The embarrased aznblader refers, in-thread, to the original post as "an abortion of idiocy."

• "This is why we can't have nice things." Often said when people act up in MetaTalk.

• ToddLokken is arguably one of the latest MetaFilter Injokes, though it seems to quickly died off due to the disapproval of #1.

• "We Have Cameras". In late 2001, Amazon screwed up a special 'Buy this camera and get that bag free" promotion to be "Buy this bag and get that camera free." This was [reported on MetaFilter] and many members ended up getting rather good cameras for very little money. [See the first instance of 'we have cameras' by NortonDC].

• "WHAT. THE. FUCK. MATT?" or variants of it. First sighted [in this MetaTalk thread], it is now used in more humorous situations. Example: WOULD YOU LIKE. A COOKIE. MATT?

General humour in a thread is fine. In-jokes, though, are frowned upon because they clutter the site and confuse those outside the MeFi community. [Matt doesn't like them.] In fact, he tends to delete them on a regular basis. Fresh, original wit is probably a better way to contribute.

In-jokes aren't really supposed to make any sense; there are no complicated backstories behind them. You'll often find them in DeadThreads that people are messing about in (that said, threads that do contain in-jokes - even a large number - are not necessarily dead). If you see an offhanded reference to (say) pancakes and it doesn't appear to make any sense - don't worry, you aren't missing out on anything.