4 ms·
No more jokes on HN?
by lukasm 13y ago
No more jokes on HN?
- chc 13y agoHN has never been a very good environment for jokes. One of the big goals of HN was to optimize for signal, both quality and quantity. Jokes are noise. If you want to do Reddit-style pun threads, you can go to one of the many subreddits that welcomes those. There is no shortage of places to find jokes on the Internet, but there is a severe lack of places where you can find thoughtful comments by knowledgeable people. Paul Graham wrote in one of his essays about Hacker News: The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. … Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. … Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes. (What I've Learned From Hacker News: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)
- teemo_cute 13y agoI agree. Sometimes, though, a properly inserted joke can dissolve heated arguments. In NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) it's called a 'Pattern Interrupt.'
- InclinedPlane 13y agoHN has never been anti-joke but it's always been anti-distraction. You can make jokes on HN but the only way they're not going to be downvoted into oblivion is if they don't distract from the subject or are exceptionally funny.