Hipster
A hipster is generally described as "...an Illogicopedian without psychological aid, which may include brain medication, psychiatric assistance, or placebo teddy bears."[1] Hipsters are often mocked for their noninclusive irony, although an ?pedian without psychological support is just about as ironic as a cow giving birth to a salamander (The irony of this situation is under speculation). By virtue of a common understanding, a hipster will participate with great dignity in the writing of articles linking to "ironic" pages that produce a pun-like link joke, or simply to less mainstream articles, i.e. articles with less than five views. If/when one of these articles gets featured, the hipster will take pride in "liking it first", hence numerous uncalled for nominations of poorly-written, low-quality articles that no one has heard of for feature by these hipsters.
Behavior
As aforementioned in the introductory statement, hipsters maintain a huge focus on irony. For example, your typical hipster would make a link such as the following:
Jimmy's first word was "mama" |
The linking of a phrase to a practically unseen page of the opposite meaning is textbook action by a hipster. Links similar to the given are profuse in their articles, which also reject any ?pedia style that my be prevalent at the time. For example, if the trend spreading among ?pedia users is pumping out IllogiNews articles, the hipster will be the first to author an IllogiBook and slap an ironic template on it. These articles wreak of references to fourth-party news sources that get 6 six hits a day[2].
Hipsters also love to support the general welfare of Illogicopedia in the forums, urging people to vote, add categories, or generally contribute to the community, and then sit around and do nothing of the sort. This hypocrisy is defended by the claim to "irony" on their talk pages often.
Taste
Hipsters allow the vintage and author of an article to heavily influence their liking of it, not quality or writing style. For example, an article written in 2007 is far more valuable to a hipster as opposed to an article from 2010. That being stated, hipsters spend hours digging through the contributions of currently retired users, such as Fluffalizer or Math Poet, looking for articles authored by them in their prime that were not very influential. Finding an unpopular article by these old but well known users is hipster gold.
Eventually, the hipster attachment to the article boosts its view count to a point where the article is considered "mainstream", and the hipster systematically abandons its leech-like bond to it. Similarly, if they run out of articles to become obsessed with by an author, the author is forever removed from their list of authors to like.
View Count
View count is critical. The the view count is inversely proportional to the hipster's interest in that article. For example, the hipster never goes to Main Page, statistically the most viewed article on the wiki. Rather, they have a bookmark to Recent Changes or their user page to click on to access the wiki. Thus, it is always a priority to never access one of the pages listed under most viewed on the statistics page. Hipsters therefore never vote on IOTM, as they do not allow themselves to access that page. To do so would create conditions of unspeakable humiliation.
Hipsters thrive on new pages, as they tend to have less views than that of older articles. The first thing one does if one is a hipster is rapidly scroll to the bottom of the page, ignoring any content in fear of enjoying it, and checking the view count. If the view count is sufficiently low, it is acceptable for them to go back up to the top and begin reading the page. Regardless of quality and actual enjoyment, they like it.
Criticism
Hipsters are criticized by the mainstream, generally for not being mainstream. Other members of the non-mainstream population that are not hipsters tend to criticize them for creating their own version of "hipster mainstream" which includes the standard, predictably behavior and taste in articles. However, mainstream users don't usually criticize the hipsters for bringing views to the less popular articles and nominating for feature, because rarely they find a gem or two of an article and/or bring nostalgia to older users who were familiar with the now-retired author of the article being nominated by a hipster.