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by genericsteele 4436 days ago
Idea: StackOverflow for comebacks

I've always had a hard time coming up with a good comeback in conversations. It would be great to have a site where I could post a situation and have the community suggest and upvote/downvote insults and comebacks. Maybe introduce a real-time element so I could use it in an actual conversation.

5 comments

Real time? Good comebacks are immediate. Taking just 5s to consult your phone and deliver the comeback is just going to give the other guy more ammunition
Here's an analog solution to your problem: Find some of the collections of "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions", a long-running series Al Jaffee did in MAD. It took the format of a cartoon drawing setting up the situation, with one person asking a question, and another offering three funny answers, plus a blank to write your own. Which is super valuable, because a lot of having a good comeback is rehearsing a bunch of them beforehand, so you have something ready.

(For instance sometimes I like to wear little horns glued to my forehead while looking otherwise normal. People regularly ask me "are those real?" By repeatedly answering that question, I now know that some variant of "yeah, I used to file them down, but I've been letting them grow out because I've been busy" will get a laugh.)

You can literally create a StackOverflow for comebacks at http://area51.stackexchange.com/

If you do, I'll commit to it :)

I suggest you pick up books on Rhetoric, the art of persuasive speaking. There exist some people who will win any argument regardless of how sound their logic is.
Twitter?
Yes, but I think it would be fun to gamify it somehow.
Reddit.

EDDIT: Re gamifying, karma does it.

But then how could I monetize it? I don't think I could run adverts on someone else's service?