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Jokes not being welcomed is one of the reasons I love this site. When jokes are fully accepted they tend to be lower effort than a comment that is thoughtful,

Jokes not being welcomed is one of the reasons I love this site. When jokes are fully accepted they tend to be lower effort than a comment that is thoughtful, and in reddit they tend to get more upvotes than the thoughtful one. This incentives people to write low effort jokes in order to get more fake points. The tendency thus created alienates rational discussion and doesn't bring much information. There are already places in where you can be witty instead of wise, but this is not one of them.

khazhoux 5y ago
What irks me is when humor is automatically equated with low effort. Sometimes, a joke is the perfect comment on a thread, but heaven forbid we crack a smile.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Jokes within thoughtful comments have no problem to get upvoted here. Don't mistake "apparent humorless" for "completely dry", as many highly upvoted comments do contain humor, but it's more subtle and within a comment that is insightful even without the joke, not just a comment containing a joke without anything else. On Reddit there is a lot of jokes, but most of them are replicas or just pure memes that gets repeated ad infinitum, nothing that really cracks me up except some rare ones. But on HN, when there is a highly upvoted comment with a joke somewhere within, it's always good one that contributes to the comments otherwise insightful points.
- rglullis 5y ago
  The problem is not humor on online forums being "low effort", it's "low SNR". The problem is when everyone thinks that they have some unique insight and that their cynical one-liners are worthy to be written down. Put that together with the development of "in-groups", and you'd see most of the threads becoming sequences of re-hashed jokes. You get "ha-ha funny" posts, but you get no one really challenging anything related to the topic and you drown out those that might actually have something to add to the conversation. Good comedy/satire works when it manages to bring new insight into a topic. If you have such talent and your comment can be insightful and humorous, I doubt you'd have trouble with the crowd.
krapp 5y ago
You would have a point if people tended to be wise here, but HN just trades humor for smugness and cynicism. Instead of the top comment being a joke it tends to be a middlebrow dismissal from someone who never bothered to read the article past the headline. The lack of humor doesn't make the comments here more information dense, it just moves the entropy elsewhere and makes it a bit more insufferable.
- throwamon 5y ago
  Great point, and I agree that it sucks that low-effort "serious" comments are more tolerated than humorous ones. But I also think disallowing jokes has a "chilling effect" that ultimately encourages a greater number of people to either think before they post or not post at all. It's not perfect, and of course I'd prefer if low-effort comments vanished regardless of their tone, but it's waaay easier to get away (or even become a celebrity) with extremely low-effort comments on Reddit, low brow or not.
- rglullis 5y ago
  You are not wrong, but the solution to this problem is by discouraging smug and cynical comments, not by just giving up and letting HN become reddit.
trollied 5y ago
I disagree. This place takes itself too seriously sometimes, and needs a little humour to lighten things up.
moreira 5y ago
This is it - if you want humour, there are already a million places where you can get that. Reddit’s already a thing; go to the relevant subreddits there. But if you want serious and mostly respectful discussions (people losing their cool and attacking others also gets downvoted quite harshly), you’ve got HN. You can criticise it; it definitely sometimes is just smugness or low-effort cynicism. It’s not perfect, but it sure as heck is one of the best communities I’ve ever seen. If this place became like Reddit, it’d lose its whole raison d'être.

khazhoux 5y ago

What irks me is when humor is automatically equated with low effort. Sometimes, a joke is the perfect comment on a thread, but heaven forbid we crack a smile.

capableweb 5y ago
Jokes within thoughtful comments have no problem to get upvoted here. Don't mistake "apparent humorless" for "completely dry", as many highly upvoted comments do contain humor, but it's more subtle and within a comment that is insightful even without the joke, not just a comment containing a joke without anything else. On Reddit there is a lot of jokes, but most of them are replicas or just pure memes that gets repeated ad infinitum, nothing that really cracks me up except some rare ones. But on HN, when there is a highly upvoted comment with a joke somewhere within, it's always good one that contributes to the comments otherwise insightful points.
rglullis 5y ago
The problem is not humor on online forums being "low effort", it's "low SNR". The problem is when everyone thinks that they have some unique insight and that their cynical one-liners are worthy to be written down. Put that together with the development of "in-groups", and you'd see most of the threads becoming sequences of re-hashed jokes. You get "ha-ha funny" posts, but you get no one really challenging anything related to the topic and you drown out those that might actually have something to add to the conversation. Good comedy/satire works when it manages to bring new insight into a topic. If you have such talent and your comment can be insightful and humorous, I doubt you'd have trouble with the crowd.

krapp 5y ago

You would have a point if people tended to be wise here, but HN just trades humor for smugness and cynicism. Instead of the top comment being a joke it tends to be a middlebrow dismissal from someone who never bothered to read the article past the headline. The lack of humor doesn't make the comments here more information dense, it just moves the entropy elsewhere and makes it a bit more insufferable.

throwamon 5y ago
Great point, and I agree that it sucks that low-effort "serious" comments are more tolerated than humorous ones. But I also think disallowing jokes has a "chilling effect" that ultimately encourages a greater number of people to either think before they post or not post at all. It's not perfect, and of course I'd prefer if low-effort comments vanished regardless of their tone, but it's waaay easier to get away (or even become a celebrity) with extremely low-effort comments on Reddit, low brow or not.
rglullis 5y ago
You are not wrong, but the solution to this problem is by discouraging smug and cynical comments, not by just giving up and letting HN become reddit.

trollied 5y ago

I disagree. This place takes itself too seriously sometimes, and needs a little humour to lighten things up.

moreira 5y ago

This is it - if you want humour, there are already a million places where you can get that. Reddit’s already a thing; go to the relevant subreddits there. But if you want serious and mostly respectful discussions (people losing their cool and attacking others also gets downvoted quite harshly), you’ve got HN. You can criticise it; it definitely sometimes is just smugness or low-effort cynicism. It’s not perfect, but it sure as heck is one of the best communities I’ve ever seen. If this place became like Reddit, it’d lose its whole raison d'être.