You're Not In The Target Audience!

Hello, darling cuddlefish. I'm sorry I missed a week. It's not you, it's me. But I'm back, and I want to talk to you about something you've been saying a lot.

I know you think that it's clever or insightful to insinuate that we're not part of the "target audience" whenever we dislike an Xkcd that you liked because of its nerd references or whatever, but I think you should know that it's just not true. And it hurts, deep down where I'm soft like a woman, every time you say it.

The problem is it's not true, unless Xkcd's target audience is "everyone who likes Xkcd," which it isn't. Xkcd's target audience has always been, broadly, "nerds." Or more specifically, people who like nerdy humor. A lot of the appeal of Xkcd in its early days is that it felt like a comic that was made by People Like Us. Then it stopped being funny.

A lot of people seem to assume that the regulars here lack sufficient nerd cred to be considered part of the target audience. Maybe it's not apparent, but this is simply not true. We have mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, and engineers, all of whom dislike the comic--often because, not in spite of, their expertise in the fields. There are several instances where I personally thought a comic was at least okay, only to find that it seriously offended someone who knew more about the field.

At the same time, it is worth noting that I'm not a stereotypical nerd. I'm a social scientist; I like creative writing and studying culture. I note this primarily because for the longest time, Xkcd was not just stereotypical nerd humor. This is easy to miss. It wasn't just a comic that was "LOL science!"--indeed, 3/4 of the comic's self-description is "romance, sarcasm, and language," all traditionally the fields of us non-hard-science people. Xkcd was remarkable because it bridged the gap between the nerdy and the non-nerdy. In many ways it marked a change in the culture, where being into traditionally nerdy things did not make you a social pariah, and where people who were not into traditionally nerdy things could still be at home among nerds.

In many ways this has not changed (more on that in a bit); it's the quality of humor that has declined. There is a reason that it has gone from possibly my favorite webcomic to a webcomic I'm happy to regularly say sucks on a blog. It's not that the target audience changed or I stopped being part of it; it's that it started sucking.

Now, has the target audience changed to an extent? Certainly. It is much more focused on the dregs of internet culture now, deriving humor from memes, memes, memes. "Hey guys, have you heard about the internet? IT IS HILARIOUS." The thing is, while this is certainly contributing to the comic's decline, it still doesn't alienate any of us from the target audience. Indeed, if anything this represents a broadening of the target audience.

Perhaps that's part of the problem--the comic was once geared towards "people who liked things which were clever," and is now geared towards "people who are complete idiots." If that's the case, then I'm proudly not part of the target audience, and happy to continue mocking it.

Finally, I'd like to point out this is mostly another ad hominem attack--it fails to actually respond to any of the points we raise about why Xkcd sucks.

Have an evening.