The exact origins of April Fools Day are hard to nail down, with variations on the idea stretching back hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years in cultures throughout the world—including ones you might not necessarily associate with an uproarious sense of humor, like Iranians, and the French. The pranks marking the occasion—from the ancient Persian new year practice of fibbing called Dorough-e Sizdah ("the lie of the thirteenth") to the custom in some parts of Europe of affixing a paper fish to someone's back—have long served as a form of cultural tension release.

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What a quaint idea, a day set aside for mischief. Now, thanks to the Internet, hardly a day goes by now that we're not confronted with some kind of prank or another—whether it's a comedy gag, like whatever Jimmy Kimmel is up to, or something like shared stories from Andy Borowitz, The Daily Currant, and the like. Will Smith is dead, there's a machine that can turn water into wine, hoverboards are coming (finally!), people are dying of marijuana overdoses, Egypt cured AIDS, wolves are roaming the hallways of the Olympic Village, Newman from Seinfeld is dead, a boy crossed the Syrian Desert alone, a rich man's daughter is giving away his fortune on PayPal, and on and on.

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And that's even before we get to all of the misleading viral headlines to which we're subjected on a regular basis, like the map of your state's favorite band, or the study that one in ten Americans think HTML is a sexually transmitted disease, or the one about Avril Lavigne being the most famous Canadian of all time. Those sorts of stories aren't pranks per se—they're simply shared because readers assume the content aggregators peddling them actually checked them out. Which they obviously didn't, because, well, why turn down the clicks?

This is an interesting turnabout. One of the most notable traditions of April Fools Day—in America and the U.K. in particular—has been that of typically staid media outlets loosening their collars and engaging in a bit of fun at the readers' expense. Among the most famous examples are the BBC's 1957 report on spaghetti plants, the 1985 Sports Illustrated story by George Plimpton on a superhuman pitching prospect, and even our own 2006 "fat tax" story.

But those days are going. Why do we need April Fools Day at all when we're served a steady diet of hoaxes every single time we log on? The conceit behind the great media-based pranks of old was that sources we normally trusted were sharing something that should be obviously fake, ha-ha. But now that it's become commonplace, that joke—like any joke you see repeated over and over again—just doesn't really seem funny anymore. We don't need April Fools Day, because every day is April Fools Day.

What do you think?