I hate Bitstrip Comics / Australians kill their servers

keith bitstrip

I know Australia is always months behind in trends online (and in real life). Bitstrip comics have been appearing in my newsfeed for months periodically and they appear to be e-cards where you can put in your own avatars and recycle a lame joke or even a non-joke (such as a string of words forming a boring sentence) with your characters inserted into the exact same situations all your friends are putting their characters into. Apparently this is comedic gold and apparently they get funnier every time you post exact same one that everyone is also posting. That sounds weird to me, but I can’t think of any other explanation.

Last night I witnessed a crazy phenomenon on Facebook where about 1 in 4 posts in my news feed were these boring comics. Often the same few comics were being used with different friends of mine in the exact same scenarios. Each time I saw what was essentially the same comic over and over again, I experienced physical pain in the part of my brain that enjoys comedy and I am concerned that it may have suffered permanent damage as now the only emotion I seem to be able to express is anger.

A lot of other friends of mine who are less easily amused than the others and I all started posting about our disinterest in these bland comics and taught each other how to block this app from appearing in the news feed.

how to block bitstrip

 

This is how you get rid of Bitstrip comics from your newsfeed. Click the arrow to the right and hit the “Block posts from Bitstrips” button (don’t unfollow your friend unless they always post lame stuff like this)

Bitstrip joke

This is much funnier than any real Bitstrip comic.

bitstrip 3

 

I posted this last night my disappointment in Australians using Bitstrip poorly.

bitstrip 2

Here’s a status about it that I did before I went to bed. Oh yeah, the Bitstrip servers actually crashed last night as millions of Australians spammed their friends with the same bland comics.

bitstrip error

I had actually given this app more credit in my first impressions. Below is part of the discussion from the first status I posted where we discussed the comics.

bitstrip 4

I’d been under the impression that people could use his to make any crazy situation but you are basically just copying premade comics that is essentially a “face in a hole” app that uses a cartoon version of yourself instead of a photo of you.

I haven’t used this app myself so I may be wrong but this is how it has been described to me.

I think that if the people who made this app were to give the user more control and could make multipanel comics with more text options (more control of speech bubbles etc) it could be quite a good app for people who want to make comics but can’t operate drawing software themselves. But until then, these are worse than planking photos.

Ok, I just looked at their site and it looks like you might be able to do more with these than what my Facebook friends have been doing. I hope this is case but I don’t have time to investigate as I’m off to see a client now (probably won’t look into it later anyway)