5 ms·

Sure, but it's different to say "people downvote humor" (which is mostly true) and "people have no sense of humor" (which is mostly an insult.) I think I have

Sure, but it's different to say "people downvote humor" (which is mostly true) and "people have no sense of humor" (which is mostly an insult.) I think I have a sense of humor, but I downvote fluff jokey comments unless they're screamingly funny. A good example is yesterday, there was a post that got a lot of upvotes before it died -- it was an image with a 6 by 6 matrix of programming languages, and each slot had a funny image macro-y picture showing how proponents of language X felt about language Y. I flagged that thread. (If it were a comment, I would downvote it.) Well, why did I do that? It wasn't terrible, although it was only a little bit funny. I did it because there are literally a million places on the internet where I can look at pictures that are a little bit funny, and only a handful of places where I can have a serious discussion about things that I am actually interested in. I believe the problem with throwaway jokes is that they're so easy. Among 1,000 average readers, perhaps 5 of them have an insightful comment about, i.e. a new feature in R6RS Scheme, but 500 of them could easily post a silly joke about parentheses. Result? If you try to talk about Scheme you get 495 jokes for every piece of expert commentary. Not cool. (Realistically, there are many other kinds of comments that are problematic in this way. For example, it's easy to religiously stick to one big general paradigm and zealously apply it to everything, so you wind up with some of that. It's easy to attack people instead of confronting complicated ideas, so you wind up with some of that. I think it's just a consequence of less-informed but social people trying to find an angle by which to contribute. Sometimes I'm guilty of this myself!) Based on my experience in other places online, it looks like a really, really, really slippery slope, so I err on the side of throwing out all fluff.

elblanco 17y ago
> Sure, but it's different to say "people downvote humor" (which is mostly true) and "people have no sense of humor" (which is mostly an insult.) I think I have a sense of humor, but I downvote fluff jokey comments unless they're screamingly funny. Which is a general policy that ensures you'll never see a joke here (screamingly funny or not). I don't think I know anybody who can produce jokes that fit your requirements at any rate even close to 100%. So I would assume, rather than risk it, why would somebody bother if some dude is just going to come by and downmod it anyways? The downvote surpresses the desire of people to even want to try. I'm not saying that all jocularity is equal. Jokes about "your mom" probably deserve a downvote (and depending on the vulgarity maybe a flag). But somebody making a witty retort, while perhaps not deserving of praise should probably be left unmolested. I've heard more jokes at a convention of priests than I see regularly on HN. Put another way, a downvote for a harmless comment is the real life equivalent of somebody making conversation with you, inserts a subtle attempt at humor, and you then proceed to glare at them, turn around and walk away. It's not helpful. But I do understand not wanting to respond back in a humorous way either, otherwise we end up with 4chan and all the irrelevant absurdity that comes with going that direction. However, due to this kind of behavior we end up with a possible HN as it could be (which may be perfectly fine by you, I don't know), of stuffy pedantic and pretentious pseudo-conversationalists who'd rather police a message forum than actually contribute something useful or interesting (or gasp even marginally funny). Maybe that's the goal, I don't know. But it makes for boring reading and conversation. > A good example is yesterday, there was a post that got a lot of upvotes before it died -- it was an image with a 6 by 6 matrix of programming languages, and each slot had a funny image macro-y picture showing how proponents of language X felt about language Y. I flagged that thread. (If it were a comment, I would downvote it.) Well, why did I do that? It wasn't terrible, although it was only a little bit funny. You flagged that thread? Are you serious? I think that's outrageous! I've seen this same image before, and I was crying laughing at it. It also could have spawned a useful discussion on perception of platform choice when building software. Customers can be users of software too, and in my experience, what language you use can positively or negatively impact perception of your product and company. The opportunity to have some interesting discourse on that topic is now dead. > I did it because there are literally a million places on the internet where I can look at pictures that are a little bit funny, and only a handful of places where I can have a serious discussion about things that I am actually interested in. But it wasn't a picture of LOLCATS or or a guy getting hit in the crotch with a frisbee or some such. It was at least marginally related, in theory, to the kinds of discussions we should be having on HN. I perfectly understand your desire to seek out interesting and relevant discussion to your particular areas of interest. If something doesn't fit your areas of interest, feel free to not participate, don't penalize us that do want to participate. For example, I don't think a thread on R6RS is particularly interesting or useful to a startup-oriented tech discussion forum -- marginally used language discussions should be left on the language maintainer's own forum. But if I saw a topic on the front page about it, I'd leave it absolutely unmolested because somebody thought it was interesting enough to deserve upvotes and it has about the same theoretical relevancy to HN as did the image matrix of language choice perception. > Based on my experience in other places online, it looks like a really, really, really slippery slope, so I err on the side of throwing out all fluff. Yes, I absolutely agree with you. I can understand the continuous meta-discussion here about how to keep HN from sliding down the reddit->digg->4chan slope. But I think we have to be aware of, and meta-discuss how to keep HN from going the opposite direction, that of becoming so rarefied that any nonconforming comments are immediately stifled and the entire board dies except for a small group who enjoy spending their time in a self-selected echo chamber.
- mquander 17y ago
  I understand -- I think we are just here for very different reasons, which is a consequence of coming to a website that now has one zillion readers. My primary interest by far here happens to be serious (preferably very stuffy) programming language and computer science discussion. (I'm interested in many other things, but I have other communities with which I prefer to discuss them; HN seems like kind of an echo chamber personality-wise.) My upvoted submissions are a good list of the things I like to read here: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=mquander http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=mquander I also personally have absolutely zero interest in startup and business discussion, which puts me far outside the target audience for very many articles here, although I leave them alone since that's the stated purpose of the site. So I recognize that my tastes may not represent HN any better than yours, if such a thing can be measured. Is it ethical, then, for me to flag articles which I think are not worthwhile posts? I'm not sure. Your comments make me reflect on whether that's an OK thing to do or not. I do wish there were a downvote button on posts, that means "I don't think this should be highly rated, but I don't think it should be killed either." I would prefer to use that. One thing, however. Your stated policy is: "If something doesn't fit your areas of interest, feel free to not participate, don't penalize us that do want to participate." That seems like a principled and friendly approach. But I'm not sure it scales. The front page (and the comment threads) only have so much bandwidth. Taking a "tolerant" approach without a big redesign to allow some kind of filtering means that the result will be simple majority rule, leading to a lot of very general interest posts about politics, current events, business, and technology. I know that many posts which would interest me greatly would then be buried on page N; judge for yourself whether this is the case for you. Now, it would be awfully judgmental to say that's a bad thing for a website; after all, it's providing a whole lot of people with the sort of thing they want to read. But there are so many websites that provide that kind of discussion already that I wonder if a "rarefied" niche site isn't a more valuable place in the greater ecosystem of the Internet. I voted your comment up because it made me think hard about the consequences of my actions.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    > I understand -- I think we are just here for very different reasons... True, but there's an obvious intersection of the things we are interested in. We just have to figure out how to play friendly concerning the other things in our interest sets. > Taking a "tolerant" approach without a big redesign to allow some kind of filtering means that the result will be simple majority rule, leading to a lot of very general interest posts about politics, current events, business, and technology. Well, the good news is that HN has posting guidelines http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Despite what certain members of the HN community would have you think, these aren't "rules", but they do serve a useful function in focusing the site on a core set of topic areas. I don't think there is much danger of HN becoming reddit in that sense. HN effectively acts like 2 or 3 narrowly focused subreddits on reddit.com. > Is it ethical, then, for me to flag articles which I think are not worthwhile posts? I'm not sure. Your comments make me reflect on whether that's an OK thing to do or not. I do wish there were a downvote button on posts, that means "I don't think this should be highly rated, but I don't think it should be killed either." I would prefer to use that. Well, to my understanding, posts that are completely out of guidelines should be flagged. If somebody submits a post with a link to his blog about his Camaro, it's probably okay to flag it ;) A post to something like http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ should probably just not be upvoted if you don't care for it. I could even see a downvote for something like the referenced post to the programming language perception matrix. But like I said, it could be an interesting driver of discussion. > Now, it would be awfully judgmental to say that's a bad thing for a website; after all, it's providing a whole lot of people with the sort of thing they want to read. But there are so many websites that provide that kind of discussion already that I wonder if a "rarefied" niche site isn't a more valuable place in the greater ecosystem of the Internet. Well, I think the reason most people come here is for the rather constrained topic set and the emphasis on interesting discussion (not to mention being populated with a very interesting mix of people). But it would also become very uninteresting in the general sense if it become a forum for academic discussions of programming esoterica. > I voted your comment up because it made me think hard about the consequences of my actions. That's really what all my pining away is on this thread, I appreciate you taking the time to do so. I'm a bit shocked and amazed to see a population of people here that are unwilling to do the same. I understand they are peeved at being called out for bad etiquette, but I find the discourse on this site amazing when the mechanisms for the discourse are working properly.

elblanco 17y ago

> Sure, but it's different to say "people downvote humor" (which is mostly true) and "people have no sense of humor" (which is mostly an insult.) I think I have a sense of humor, but I downvote fluff jokey comments unless they're screamingly funny. Which is a general policy that ensures you'll never see a joke here (screamingly funny or not). I don't think I know anybody who can produce jokes that fit your requirements at any rate even close to 100%. So I would assume, rather than risk it, why would somebody bother if some dude is just going to come by and downmod it anyways? The downvote surpresses the desire of people to even want to try. I'm not saying that all jocularity is equal. Jokes about "your mom" probably deserve a downvote (and depending on the vulgarity maybe a flag). But somebody making a witty retort, while perhaps not deserving of praise should probably be left unmolested. I've heard more jokes at a convention of priests than I see regularly on HN. Put another way, a downvote for a harmless comment is the real life equivalent of somebody making conversation with you, inserts a subtle attempt at humor, and you then proceed to glare at them, turn around and walk away. It's not helpful. But I do understand not wanting to respond back in a humorous way either, otherwise we end up with 4chan and all the irrelevant absurdity that comes with going that direction. However, due to this kind of behavior we end up with a possible HN as it could be (which may be perfectly fine by you, I don't know), of stuffy pedantic and pretentious pseudo-conversationalists who'd rather police a message forum than actually contribute something useful or interesting (or gasp even marginally funny). Maybe that's the goal, I don't know. But it makes for boring reading and conversation. > A good example is yesterday, there was a post that got a lot of upvotes before it died -- it was an image with a 6 by 6 matrix of programming languages, and each slot had a funny image macro-y picture showing how proponents of language X felt about language Y. I flagged that thread. (If it were a comment, I would downvote it.) Well, why did I do that? It wasn't terrible, although it was only a little bit funny. You flagged that thread? Are you serious? I think that's outrageous! I've seen this same image before, and I was crying laughing at it. It also could have spawned a useful discussion on perception of platform choice when building software. Customers can be users of software too, and in my experience, what language you use can positively or negatively impact perception of your product and company. The opportunity to have some interesting discourse on that topic is now dead. > I did it because there are literally a million places on the internet where I can look at pictures that are a little bit funny, and only a handful of places where I can have a serious discussion about things that I am actually interested in. But it wasn't a picture of LOLCATS or or a guy getting hit in the crotch with a frisbee or some such. It was at least marginally related, in theory, to the kinds of discussions we should be having on HN. I perfectly understand your desire to seek out interesting and relevant discussion to your particular areas of interest. If something doesn't fit your areas of interest, feel free to not participate, don't penalize us that do want to participate. For example, I don't think a thread on R6RS is particularly interesting or useful to a startup-oriented tech discussion forum -- marginally used language discussions should be left on the language maintainer's own forum. But if I saw a topic on the front page about it, I'd leave it absolutely unmolested because somebody thought it was interesting enough to deserve upvotes and it has about the same theoretical relevancy to HN as did the image matrix of language choice perception. > Based on my experience in other places online, it looks like a really, really, really slippery slope, so I err on the side of throwing out all fluff. Yes, I absolutely agree with you. I can understand the continuous meta-discussion here about how to keep HN from sliding down the reddit->digg->4chan slope. But I think we have to be aware of, and meta-discuss how to keep HN from going the opposite direction, that of becoming so rarefied that any nonconforming comments are immediately stifled and the entire board dies except for a small group who enjoy spending their time in a self-selected echo chamber.

mquander 17y ago
I understand -- I think we are just here for very different reasons, which is a consequence of coming to a website that now has one zillion readers. My primary interest by far here happens to be serious (preferably very stuffy) programming language and computer science discussion. (I'm interested in many other things, but I have other communities with which I prefer to discuss them; HN seems like kind of an echo chamber personality-wise.) My upvoted submissions are a good list of the things I like to read here: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=mquander http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=mquander I also personally have absolutely zero interest in startup and business discussion, which puts me far outside the target audience for very many articles here, although I leave them alone since that's the stated purpose of the site. So I recognize that my tastes may not represent HN any better than yours, if such a thing can be measured. Is it ethical, then, for me to flag articles which I think are not worthwhile posts? I'm not sure. Your comments make me reflect on whether that's an OK thing to do or not. I do wish there were a downvote button on posts, that means "I don't think this should be highly rated, but I don't think it should be killed either." I would prefer to use that. One thing, however. Your stated policy is: "If something doesn't fit your areas of interest, feel free to not participate, don't penalize us that do want to participate." That seems like a principled and friendly approach. But I'm not sure it scales. The front page (and the comment threads) only have so much bandwidth. Taking a "tolerant" approach without a big redesign to allow some kind of filtering means that the result will be simple majority rule, leading to a lot of very general interest posts about politics, current events, business, and technology. I know that many posts which would interest me greatly would then be buried on page N; judge for yourself whether this is the case for you. Now, it would be awfully judgmental to say that's a bad thing for a website; after all, it's providing a whole lot of people with the sort of thing they want to read. But there are so many websites that provide that kind of discussion already that I wonder if a "rarefied" niche site isn't a more valuable place in the greater ecosystem of the Internet. I voted your comment up because it made me think hard about the consequences of my actions.
- elblanco 17y ago
  > I understand -- I think we are just here for very different reasons... True, but there's an obvious intersection of the things we are interested in. We just have to figure out how to play friendly concerning the other things in our interest sets. > Taking a "tolerant" approach without a big redesign to allow some kind of filtering means that the result will be simple majority rule, leading to a lot of very general interest posts about politics, current events, business, and technology. Well, the good news is that HN has posting guidelines http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Despite what certain members of the HN community would have you think, these aren't "rules", but they do serve a useful function in focusing the site on a core set of topic areas. I don't think there is much danger of HN becoming reddit in that sense. HN effectively acts like 2 or 3 narrowly focused subreddits on reddit.com. > Is it ethical, then, for me to flag articles which I think are not worthwhile posts? I'm not sure. Your comments make me reflect on whether that's an OK thing to do or not. I do wish there were a downvote button on posts, that means "I don't think this should be highly rated, but I don't think it should be killed either." I would prefer to use that. Well, to my understanding, posts that are completely out of guidelines should be flagged. If somebody submits a post with a link to his blog about his Camaro, it's probably okay to flag it ;) A post to something like http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ should probably just not be upvoted if you don't care for it. I could even see a downvote for something like the referenced post to the programming language perception matrix. But like I said, it could be an interesting driver of discussion. > Now, it would be awfully judgmental to say that's a bad thing for a website; after all, it's providing a whole lot of people with the sort of thing they want to read. But there are so many websites that provide that kind of discussion already that I wonder if a "rarefied" niche site isn't a more valuable place in the greater ecosystem of the Internet. Well, I think the reason most people come here is for the rather constrained topic set and the emphasis on interesting discussion (not to mention being populated with a very interesting mix of people). But it would also become very uninteresting in the general sense if it become a forum for academic discussions of programming esoterica. > I voted your comment up because it made me think hard about the consequences of my actions. That's really what all my pining away is on this thread, I appreciate you taking the time to do so. I'm a bit shocked and amazed to see a population of people here that are unwilling to do the same. I understand they are peeved at being called out for bad etiquette, but I find the discourse on this site amazing when the mechanisms for the discourse are working properly.