Talk:CollegeHumor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[edit] "Criticisms" section
The criticism that collegehumor.com is "glorifying casual sex" is pretty baseless, I feel this part of the section could be removed as it really applies to any college-themed entertainment. If nobody responds to this comment in the next couple'a days, I'm just going to remove it.
The article that is referenced as making this criticism (from the "University fo Victoria's Independent Newspaper," not much of a source) does not implicitly criticize collegehumor.com for glorifying casual sex, but rather states that the site is based around "hookup culture," a claim which is not backed up in any way within the text. In fact the article only makes a passing reference to collegehumor.com. The article is more about the changing secxual norms in campus life (and it's a late-comer for an article on this topic, the concept of "hooking up" has been covered by other, more notable publications years before this article came out.)
Collegehumor.com only glorifies casual sex and hookups as much as the college lifestyle itself does (living away from parents/authority figures with other young people in an enclosed community, free from everyday responsibility, "experimentation" of all forms being highly enouraged).
Collegehumor.com mostly consists of images, videos, and other media that is sent in directly from college students and published on the site. So the fact that collegehumor.com deals with sex casually is merely a reflection of the material people submit to the site. I don't think it's fair to blame the sites creators/webmasters for their lack of taste, as they pretty much publish anything sent in uncensored. That's why the site is called collegehumor; it's sophmoric, dirty, crude, and that's the point. Similar sites such as the less-popular collegestories.com do the same thing dealing with sex, drugs, and general debauchery in an uncensored forum.
This criticism that collegehumor.com glroifies casual sex might be applied to the articles written by collegehumor.com's staff (which, I might add, is practically the only original content the site ever produces), but even these articles are quite varied, some depicting hookups and some about people actually in monogomous relationships, some are not about sex at all (but almost all at least reference sex, it's college, sex is on the brain).
However, I think the critcism that the site is plastered with advertisements and that they try to portray advertisements as "hotlinks" is wholly accurate.
[edit] ==
(from a parter in CollegeHumor): I would argue that there is nothing deceptive about placing advertisements in the Hotlinks section. To my knowlege, we were the first to use the term "Hotlinks" in this particular context; namely, as a list of links to external websites appearing at the end of a front-page update. We have never defined Hotlinks or otherwise implied that they are purely editorial content, nor do I feel we are violating a precedent for the content of Hotlinks, since there is no such precedent.
Do we have any evidence of complaints regarding our Hotlink practices?
[edit] ==
CH.com didn't violate a precedent by putting advertisements within the hotlinks. But the advertisements that appear in the hotlinks are different from the other ads on the site in that they are not always clearly presented as advertisements. An advertisment in the hotlinks probably has a better chance of people clicking it than, say, a banner ad, because it's within a lot of entertainment content and people don't necessarily know it's an ad (they might think it's more pictures/funny articles, because the captions for the links aren't always descriptive of what they are). So, in that way, I actually think it is a little deceptive (sort of like those fake articles in magazines that have the words "special advertising section" in tiny print hidden an the top, a way of getting people to look at ads by presenting it as something else). Does it cost more to advertise on your site through the hotlinks rather than banner ads?
