I use the Internet, but I don’t have all day to be surfin’ around looking for news and things on different websites. Reddit serves as a great aggregator for everything related to my interests. I just tell it I like things like ‘board games’ and it will give me all the Internets about board games.

So naturally, most of my feed is dominated by video game posts as I subscribe to several gaming-related subreddits like /r/Games, /r/RetroGameSwap and /r/GameCollecting. But by virtue of the sheer bulk of information posted to Reddit, patterns will emerge. Eventually you start to see the same old crap again and again and again. Here are a few I’m particularly tired of.

“Remember this game”

Yes. Yes I do. Everyone does. Once in a while these posts will feature something genuinely obscure like Hogs of War for PS1, but nine times out of ten it will be something totally obvious. Everyone played Spider-Man 2 on PS2, and we all loved it just as much as you did. It wouldn’t be so annoying if these posts ever generated an interesting conversation, but it will always be followed by a hundred posts from people saying “Yep” or “Epic win lolololol.”

Image reposts

Reddit generates a huge amount of original content every day, but it can often seem like the Goodwill shop of Internet “humor”. The front page of Reddit can feel like a forward from your grandmother by posting the same images over and over that you’ve already seen on every other image site. If you find an image and think it’s funny enough to share with the Internet, it couldn’t hurt to do a quick Google search to see how ubiquitous it is first.

“I just bought this”

I really don’t know what anyone gains from these posts. People will post a photo of their new t-shirt/coffee mug/poster/messenger bag emblazoned with some tired joke about games or just a picture of a popular character, because everyone has to know about it. Does anyone really care? It would be one thing if the poster designed it himself, but it’s always the same crap from ThinkGeek or TeeFury.

Anything about Mass Effect 3‘s ending

I haven’t played Mass Effect 3 yet, and I probably won’t for a while. It is a freakin’ minefield avoiding spoilers for this thing. Everyone playing it has an opinion about the story, mostly in regards to the ending which has been pissing off fans left and right since its release. Most people have the good grace to tag these posts with a spoiler warning, but others aren’t so polite. Some of us are waiting for the price to drop.

Memes

This is about the Internet in general, but I encounter memes in Reddit’s gaming boards more than anywhere else. The worst thing you can do to a joke is tell it too many time,s and a meme is killed within minutes of its inception. They’re the laziest shortcut to humor that’s ever existed, and have given thousands of Internet users a free pass for jokes. With absolutely no effort, they’ll create these tired, hackneyed images that add nothing to the conversation and stunt the creation of real comedy. If half these idiots stopped making memes and tried writing their own material, the Internet would be a much funnier place. Stop stealing other people’s work.

Let’s try and be a little original with our Internet content.