"This is one of the reasons why Twitter is such an existential pit, because the moment you have any success (i.e. lots of retweets) you are immediately punished by complete inanity, forced misunderstanding, nonsense—and, sometimes, if you’re a woman, by a miscellany of invasive threats. There’s no medium that punishes success like the Internet.
It’s not that people don’t get the jokes you make; they don’t even get that there is a joke at all. To them you are not funny, and never will be. They are the ones who are perfect for the medium, because they will repeat the same nostrums over and over, while funny people just drift away. (This is the market gap that Slack fills. It is a product that lets less funny people feel hilarious, successfully marrying enterprise groupware to local improv groups.)
This factor is rarely considered by product people, or by anyone, but it’s real. Humor is an amazing means of reaching a large audience, jokes are naturally viral—but there is a powerful immune system that kicks in with any successful joke."
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