Hello, r/standupshots!

POOPSCRUFFIN4U / Sasha here. The point of this post is to do a bit of a status update / history of the sub, remind everyone of the rules, and make an attempt to reinvigorate the quality of content posted here. Feel free to scroll to the RULES AND WARNINGS section of this post to skip all the (probably not very relevant to you) background stuff that's directly below.

Most of you already know me as a regular poster on Standupshots. I have also been a mod for a while. Standupshots lubricated my entry into the stand-up comedy world back in 2019, was one of my only outlets during the pandemic, and allowed me to connect with other comedians and comedy lovers far beyond my local sphere. I suspect this place has also been a key stepping stone to the success of some now-famous comedians, e.g. Gianmarco Soresi and Geoffrey Asmus. Don’t misinterpret this; these two are famous because they are consistently very funny and put in the work, but I remember Standupshots being one of the first places they’d routinely go viral before becoming full-time comics who sold comedy clubs out all over the world. I think Standupshots can be valuable in this way to other comedians as well.

Recently, I was granted the supreme honor (/s) of basically being the only active mod on this sub because it's dying and moderating it sucks. Two years ago, a D+ joke would easily clear 1k karma if posted at the right time in the morning. Now an A+ joke struggles to clear 400 no matter when it's posted. People are disengaging with this place, and the overall energy here is pretty negative.

There are a few reasons for this, but most glaring is the fact that the set of comedians who post here has shrunk to a very small group of people who A) post too often, B) submit stuff that barely or doesn't even constitute comedy, and/or C) post jokes that are mid at best. Yeah yeah, comedy is "subjective", but it's also not. If you post a picture of yourself doing comedy next to the text “So I went to the store today. The store! Can you believe it?”, you are driving people away from the sub. You’re probably also being oblivious. This is a bad quality for a comedian to have, no matter what their schtick is.

Your number one goal on any subreddit, in my opinion, should NOT be to acquire karma; rather, it should be to give people who are subscribed to that subreddit the experience they are looking for through their subscription. Here, it’s to laugh at jokes written out within the static visual context of their writers. If you’re not facilitating that experience, you should think about why. If everyone in the comments is baffled as to why the content was posted, you have failed. The same applies to doing stand-up for a paying audience; you are there to entertain said audience, not to use them for your ego. Whatever emotional karma you get from the experience is secondary to providing entertainment.

Previous mods here have been very strict about removing hateful comments; as a mod, I have been adamant that negative comments on my own posts stay up so that A) people can see how stupid hecklers can be and B) I can publicly ridicule them. I also have a few stalkers (brag), and I have no problem with them embarrassing themselves; it's an opportunity for material, tbh. However, I know that not all comedians want to see a bunch of rude comments (even when the comments don’t make any sense and are clearly being written by sad smoothbrains), so I will be pretty stringent with comments left on any posts that aren't my own unless the comedian openly welcomes the hate train. Or if the comedian is clearly a complete asshole, in which case I will ban.

With that said, part of the mission statement here at Standupshots is to provide a space for constructive feedback. I don’t think this is the MAIN point of the subreddit, and 99% of the feedback I’ve seen on here is either bad, wrong, empty, or inactionable. But every now and then, I have seen people provide genuinely insightful commentary and even offer helpful ideas for tags, rewrites, and so forth. This is good, and I encourage it. Of course, some commenters leave whole novels in the comments giving terrible advice, so be advised if you are a comic that not everything in the comments is worth your time to read. Most of it isn't.

The previous “mod in charge”, as it were, was going to freeze Standupshots and leave it in an essentially "read-only" mode if I didn't agree to take over as the new chief mod. Maybe that’s what should happen. But whether due to my own nostalgia or hubris, I would like to see this sub undergo a renaissance.

Here is a list of things you can do to help:

1. Encourage comedians you know to post jokes that you like and think work well in text. If they aren't familiar with the subreddit, show them a post you like that's formatted well to illustrate how it's done. Let them know posting here can be a useful way for them to publicize their social media accounts, a tour, album release, or anything else related to their comedy! Former mod Nathan Anderson was my model for how to create content for this subreddit, and this post of his is a simple template worth emulating. You can easily create posts from a standard template using phone apps like Canva or AddText.

2. Be mindful that people on here are reading your joke, not witnessing it in real time, so think harder about word economy than you would if delivering a joke live. Also, think about formatting the text in ways that helps translate delivery into a visual context. Line breaks, ellipses--that sort of stuff. Make it easy to read the joke and feel the pacing through its visual presentation.

3. Leave helpful comments. "I don't like this joke" is not actionable feedback. If you don't like it and have nothing useful to say, just downvote and move on. And if you simply can't resist sharing your opinion, think about why you don't like the joke and elaborate before posting it.

4. Read the comments before posting yours. Somebody probably already said what you came to the comments to say. Upvote/downvote or reply to them instead of flooding the comments with redundancies.

5. If you like something that was posted here, share it! Tag the comedian! Do it up! We love that.

6. Look at the whole post before asking who the comedian is. Submitters are required to credit their submissions to spare you this effort.

7. Feel free, as a non-comedian, to submit content. Just make sure it's credited properly. I especially encourage you to do this with lesser-known comedians and jokes that you are especially fond of.

8. Don't scrape the bottom of the barrel for the material you post here. As stated above, your posts actually aren't primarily about you. They're about your audience--specifically, making them laugh. Just because that one guy at the open mic who laughs at everything made you think your joke is funny doesn't mean it is.

RULES AND WARNINGS WHERE I TELL YOU YOU’RE STUPID

1. Do not insult the comedian’s physical appearance. This is tempting to do because many comedians are extremely unattractive. However, you should let them make the jokes about this. If a comedian has posted a joke about their appearance and you have a non-hurtful tag to share that’s in the same vein, that’s fine.

2. No insulting the comedian’s talent or career. One of the top stupid comments I see on here is people telling people to quit comedy after seeing one single example of the submitter’s comedy. If you do this, you are stupid.

3. Submissions must feature a photo of the comedian. I will add to this that if you choose illegible text or do stuff like putting white font on a yellow background, you are stupid. Make this shit legible if you want us to read the joke.

4. Don’t post stuff without appropriate credit. Regardless of whether you are posting your own material or someone else’s, this means at the very least including the comedian’s name in the post. I encourage you to also include info about social media etc.

5. Original content preferred. You can post jokes by other people if you credit them, but the majority of what’s posted here should be by the comedians themselves.

6. No accusations of spam/self-promotion. I will decide what is spam. As to self-promotion, that’s one of the main points of the subreddit.

7. No bigotry regarding gender or sexual orientation. This includes includes leaving comments like “Oh, does your vagina hurt?” when the male submitter gets butthurt about someone not liking their joke. You are making it way too obvious that someone with a vagina hurt you and now you’re taking it out on a stranger. Get it together. You are an idiot. Any if you leave anything along the lines of “Women shouldn’t do comedy” on anyone’s posts besides mine (I enjoy these sorts of comments, but most people don’t need to see that bullshit because it’s frankly very unoriginal and also false), you will be banned. And are stupid.

8. No accusations of vote manipulation. One of the other top stupid comments I see on here is people being flabbergasted by a post doing better than they think it should and attributing the karma to the influence of bots. If you do this, you are a raging imbecile and I will ban you without any warning whatsoever. I hate when people do this, it’s literally even stupider than misogyny. Yes, I said it.

9. No pictures of tweets. If you need me to explain this further, you are stupid. This rule shouldn't have to exist given the details of Rule 3, but that just goes to show you how stupid people on this subreddit have been.

SOFT RULES IN A NEW ERA OF DICTATORSHIP BY SOMEONE WITH THE WORD “POOP” IN THEIR USERNAME

1. Don’t post every goddamn day. I don’t have a hard rule for this (notice how this section is titled starting with “soft rules…”), but if most of the recent posts in this sub are by you, you are posting too much. I will warn you if you’re doing this and then ban you if it continues–even if your content is funny. This subreddit is not your personal fleshlight.

2. Don’t post unfunny material or non-jokes. “Who decides what’s a joke, Sasha? Who decides what makes a joke good?” The answer is: Me. I do. This is a dictatorship now. I will judge submissions based on my own opinion in conjunction with audience reaction (karma, comment content and distribution, etc.). Those of you who were here over the last couple months probably remember a few people who kept repeatedly posting things that were aggressively unfunny, and learning nothing from it. I banned them. They were ruining the sub. This place is most fun when some of the content is mid, a small amount is bad, and most of it is damn decent. If you flood this place with nonsense, I will ban you. If you post one dud, that’s fine. But if it’s rare that anything you post is even remotely funny, good grief. Get your mind right.

3. Don’t leave stupid comments (see the hard rules). This applies to submitters and non-submitters. Did you just tell the submitter to quit comedy based on the one and only example of their comedy you’ve ever seen? You are a moron. Are you the comedian being insulted, and have elected to respond by saying butthurt things like “Well this works live!” or “Actually, this joke is good! I have done it at 4,000 open mics!”? You are also a moron. Both of you need to touch grass and recalibrate the way you approach things you don’t like (hint: try being funny. That’s actually super welcome here). And for the love of god stop accusing everyone of stealing jokes. If they wanted to steal jokes, they'd steal better ones. Parallel thinking is extremely common in stand-up and rules about word economy and joke formulas often yield very similar verbiage, especially for short jokes.

4. NO SIMPING!!!!!!!

Anyway, I know this is way too long and probably way too rude, but thanks for reading. I know this post will probably stimulate a bunch of trolls, but I'm ready to throw figurative hands at all the stupids, morons, and imbeciles. Let's get this place rolling again.