Humour sites: how the format works and what to expect

Humour was one of the first things the web was used for and one of the last areas where large community-driven sites still dominate. Most of the traffic in this category goes to a handful of aggregation platforms where users submit and vote, which produces a particular kind of content: short, visual, fast-moving and heavily recycled.

Recycling is the defining characteristic of the category and not necessarily a flaw. A joke that circulates for fifteen years across four platforms is doing what jokes do. It does mean that originality is rarely the useful measure, and that attribution is almost always missing.

What differentiates sites here is moderation. Comment sections and open submission make this category one of the most variable on the web for what you will encounter, and sites differ enormously in how much they intervene. If you are browsing somewhere a child might see the screen, that is the thing to check before anything else.

The listings below include both the large platforms and smaller specialist sites. The smaller ones tend to be edited rather than voted on, which produces a narrower and more consistent selection.