Cards Against Humanity Bought Clickhole

February 3, 2020 3:52 PM

The card game company purchased the comedy website from G/O Media in an all-cash deal, and transformed Clickhole into a majority employee-owned company.
posted by Etrigan (33 comments total)

This is beautiful.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 4:06 PM on February 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

Well, if anyone's taking recommendations for new staff, literally a hundred writers/producers from CollegeHumor became available recently.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 4:09 PM on February 3, 2020 [13 favorites]

I'm here for this. At least it's not a site that G/O can ruin any more.
posted by deezil at 4:09 PM on February 3, 2020 [6 favorites]

“We will be sad to leave all our friends at The Onion except for this one guy Nick, who sucks,” Etheridge told BuzzFeed News. “The good news is that security at The Onion office is very poor, so we can break in and visit our friends any time we want."
posted by Pastor of Muppets at 4:34 PM on February 3, 2020 [26 favorites]

Please do the same for the Deadspin crew. Please.
posted by Ber at 4:36 PM on February 3, 2020 [4 favorites]

#TheyBoughtWHAT #Wow
posted by emelenjr at 4:38 PM on February 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

Well that's kind of awesome.
posted by fnerg at 4:40 PM on February 3, 2020

It's kinda exciting to know that ClickHole is owned by people who understand why it exists and know what to do with it.
posted by wotsac at 4:47 PM on February 3, 2020 [7 favorites]

Spending the weekend reading Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog made me doubly mad that G/O was so braindead with it. So, woo!
posted by drewbage1847 at 4:52 PM on February 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is amazing! I was wondering if there's a specific connection, and sure enough:

Both Cards Against Humanity and ClickHole are based in Chicago, and according to Temkin, their staffs have known one another from the local comedy scene for years, which led to discussions of the sale in 2019.

I sincerely hope that the ClickHole employees can really build something here, a successful employee-owned model would drastically change the conversation around these issues--especially given their new creative and editorial control:

“We’re giving them funding, and if they ask us, we’ll be an advisor,” Temkin told BuzzFeed News, saying that the ClickHole team will operate independently, with financial support. “We just want to give them a chance to do their thing. They’re really capable — really smart and innovative. And I don't know if they’ve had that opportunity before to try all these creative [ideas for the site].”

(One also gets the impression that publishing card games is much more lucrative than previously thought...how much extra revenue does CAH have to burn?)
posted by LooseFilter at 4:53 PM on February 3, 2020 [9 favorites]

CAH is basically unprecedentedly lucrative, they essentially have money to burn as far as I can tell.
posted by PennD at 4:58 PM on February 3, 2020 [10 favorites]

What was the project that CAH did, like spend as much money as they could digging a hole, because they had too much money
posted by eustatic at 5:13 PM on February 3, 2020 [8 favorites]

CAH offers the occasional, barest, glimpse into their finances for their holiday giveaways on their blog. Eg Cardsagainsthumanityredistributesyourwealth.com from Dec 2017.
posted by fragmede at 5:15 PM on February 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

What was the project that CAH did, like spend as much money as they could digging a hole, because they had too much money

They bought a plot of land Trump's wall would need in order to be built, with the purpose of tying the wall building up with litigation.
posted by dobbs at 5:19 PM on February 3, 2020 [22 favorites]

Even as someone who's frequently lukewarm about CAH as a game and a company, I think this is a great move. It's a good fit, and more importantly fuck G/O Media. The only downside, really, is that G/O received some non-zero amount of money in the deal.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:21 PM on February 3, 2020 [6 favorites]

I think of Cards Against Humanity as like a weird novelty gift - like, it's edgier than Apples to Apples, and it's an attractive game that is also very filthy, so it has cross-over appeal, but it's kind of limited as a game in that the white cards are pre-prepared punchlines and they only really work once. This is quite lucrative for Cards Against Humanity, because it means that lots of expansions are necessary (and if there's a card that dates poorly or shouldn't have been made, like the infamous transphobic one, they can toss it without a second thought because it was going to get tossed anyway).

But I will always appreciate their use of the FAQ format for comedy.
posted by Merus at 5:36 PM on February 3, 2020

eustatic: You're thinking of the Holiday Hole, a depressingly nihilistic stunt which raised over $100,000.
posted by waxpancake at 5:36 PM on February 3, 2020 [5 favorites]

"a successful employee-owned model would drastically change the conversation around these issues"

With love and respect, probably not. The conversation *you're* having is about the success, while the conversation *they're* having is about the ownership.
posted by Horkus at 5:42 PM on February 3, 2020

Cor Caroli, can you imagine if everyone who had the money used their money to fix things and make the world a better place? Wouldn't that be nice?!?
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:02 PM on February 3, 2020

For those who hate the game: Chicago comedy/podcast/RPG guy James D'Amato came up with the idea of using a cards against humanity deck as a spellbook in some simple RPG like this one or this one. So you draw a card, then you roll to see how friendly the summoned effect/person is. Some of the fun is thinking up dangerous but not sexual interpretations of borderline cards, E.G. I had one player draw 'Maximum Insertion' and the friendly murderbot they were talking to just got driven into the ground.



Anyway I hope they buy the Onion next and the entire management structure of G/O ends up in jail. I don't know what laws they've broken but I'm sure there's something.
posted by fomhar at 6:04 PM on February 3, 2020 [13 favorites]

I absolutely hate the game and love the company.

Totally agree. I know it's obligatory to link to Greg Nog's tweet, but it really does sum up my feelings about the game better than I can.
posted by MrBadExample at 6:08 PM on February 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

Also totally agree. You couldn't pay me to play/buy CAH.

But as a company, they keep on doing shit I approve of.
We live in a strange stub...
posted by Windopaene at 6:33 PM on February 3, 2020 [10 favorites]

Happy to read Clickhole has been purchased by a company that gives a shit. I’m sure it’s been noted before on the Blue but it sucks to see private equity moving on from running newspapers out of business to running our favorite web sites out of business.
posted by photoslob at 7:36 PM on February 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

Impressive number crunching on their giveaway.

Family favourite for Christmas Day is CAH - after Christmas dinner, digesting food, the past year, and what we do and don't like about each other. No-one is interested in winning - just finding another topic to talk about.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 8:30 PM on February 3, 2020

You're thinking of the Holiday Hole, a depressingly nihilistic stunt which raised over $100,000.

Nihilistic? From the linked FAQ page:

Q. Why aren't you giving all this money to charity?

A. Why aren't YOU giving all this money to charity? It's your money.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:56 PM on February 3, 2020 [22 favorites]

I get a lot of the reservations about CAH as an organisation. In trying to be "edgy", their game originally had a lot of cards that "punched down" in your typical dudebro edgelord way.

At one point a few years ago, someone on tumblr posted photos burning a particularly transphobic card in a kitchen sink, and the founder reblogged it to say "Oh yeah, that one. I suppose we probably should have been louder about this, but we did the same thing to that card six months ago. It will never appear again in our game."

So while they're still making money off of the "wackiness" of some really borderline stuff, they appear to be trying not to come off as "MAYBE U CANT TAKE A JOEK FREE SPEECH FREE SPEECH" jerks. I think they've seen the limitation of claiming that the cards are just a Rorschach and all the "isms" are coming out of the players themselves, but I guess time will tell how well they walk that line.

But a worker-owned ClickHole? Well let's see what they come up with!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:05 AM on February 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

Cards Against Humanity has their own improv theater! I am actually performing at Cards Against Humanity theater in Chicago this Wednesday.
posted by amtho at 2:17 AM on February 4, 2020 [7 favorites]

Kudos to Katie Notopolous for including the fact about CAH that the Internet has decided to never talk about:

Temkin was accused of sexual assault in 2014, an allegation he denied.
posted by aedison at 4:25 AM on February 4, 2020 [9 favorites]

At one point a few years ago, someone on tumblr posted photos burning a particularly transphobic card in a kitchen sink, and the founder reblogged it to say "Oh yeah, that one. I suppose we probably should have been louder about this, but we did the same thing to that card six months ago. It will never appear again in our game."

So while they're still making money off of the "wackiness" of some really borderline stuff, they appear to be trying not to come off as "MAYBE U CANT TAKE A JOEK FREE SPEECH FREE SPEECH" jerks.

Huh, I'm trans and my interpretation of this was different. They saw on their own that the card was problematic, and they removed it without a lot of hoopla. Which I personally appreciate, because I find it grating when people or companies bring light to transphobia to make a point of how against transphobia they are. Like "oh great, now not only have I been exposed to transphobia, but I have to expend some emotional labor congratulating you on being a good ally." I like it a lot better when people or companies realize they fucked up and quietly do what they need to do to fix it.
posted by lunasol at 10:20 AM on February 4, 2020 [10 favorites]

The game is sometimes problematic, but not as problematic as some of the game's fans who seem delighted they can say naughty things, like a child who discovers they can say "poopy!" over and over. The company does seem to be open to changing and evolving and dropping cards as they discover that some jokes aren't as funny as they thought, and that's good. But I have to say that some of the things the company has done with the money is outstanding - this is good, and iirc, some years ago they gave a paid vacation to the workers in the factory that was printing the cards.
posted by rmd1023 at 5:09 PM on February 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

As an occasional player with a UK group who only play when someone buys a new (i.e. old, US) expansion, my trick for CAH is sly extemporising instead of reading the more shitty/boring black cards. My proudest success so far is sneaking gratuitous Pearl Jam lyrics in: "'Son', she said, 'have I got a little story for you... _BLANK_" (fwiw, I read all cards out twice as though I'm Les Dawson presenting Blankety Blank).
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 9:55 PM on February 4, 2020

I was invited to a multilingual CAH chatbot group some of my friends are in, after I shared this story.

On joining I joked about being the only UK player in a group of mixed company (mostly immigrants to the Netherlands) and how my home currently seems to be top of the leader board for xenophobia but I'd not consciously represent that in my card choices.

At the very mention of xenophobia, a player I hadn't met before with a Dutch name and an apparently Caucasian male avatar photo started instantly going off on an anti-immigration tirade. So yeah, the angry xenophobes still seem attracted to this game. Moderate all your spaces.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:40 AM on February 5, 2020

I've played CAH a few times, it was fine but nothing special. Some of the cards were iffy but they do seem at least able to take criticism over it.

However, every person I've met who was really into CAH was kind of an asshole (in the edgelord / 4chan / dont be such snowflakes vein). [I'm sure there are counter examples, just my experience anyway]
posted by thefoxgod at 2:52 PM on February 6, 2020 [1 favorite]