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Comment by sikosmurf | Hacker News Reader

Please refrain from starting and continuing "comment chains". It's not funny and doesn't add to the conversation.

I disagree. I think it's important to show that multiple people decided to donate because of this single comment. It's prompted me to donate to Let's Encrypt.

I also donated I think the feeling of missing out helped sway the decision.

I just donated, but only because the thread got this deep.

Is there any other way to donate but with PayPal? I want to but not through PayPal.

that's what the up-vote button is for

The upvote count is kept private, so it doesn't serve the same purpose of indicating public support for a comment.

Unfortunately meta discussions are frowned upon too, so I shouldn't have made this comment either.

Ah, thanks. I guess I never realized that it was private.

Please refrain from telling people what is not funny. It's not polite and doesn't add to the conversation.

Please refrain from "rules lawyering". It's not funny and doesn't add to the conversation.

Please refrain from unnecessary humor-policing. It's not helpful and only detracts from the sense of community.

It's not humor-policing to point out that HN has a different culture and comments serve a different purpose here. I like pun threads - but I go to /r/jokes when I want them. Here, I expect a certain sort of signal - insight from experienced and intelligent people working hard on interesting technical problems.

This isn't to say that humor should be verboten, or pun threads strictly banned - but they're definitely not what HN has been about historically, and arguably should not be encouraged if we want HN to continue serving whatever role it serves. There are more places like /r/jokes than HN on the net, after all.

That's fine. I disagree with that policy and this is my way of expressing it.

I don't want to be petty... but your comment would have a lot more weight if you made it with your primary account.

That said, I agree with all your points... but we're humans... Even if most of our time is spent on science, we still get amused by the most silly of things; and if those things help support LetsEncrypt... Hurrah!

I'm assuming they don't have a primary, or they rather avoid the downvotes that people give without actually giving any actual feedback.

It's one thing to have rules, but don't confuse rule following with culture. Culture is emergent, and not something that is policed into place.

HN has a culture of pointing out that obvious, boring jokes have no place here. There's a constant struggle by people to introduce them, but (amongst others) those of us who watched Slashdot flush itself down the toilet of shitty humor are going to police the site because it's what we want.

Isn't it fair to say that the field of computer science has (up until recently, apparently) distinguished itself with its corny humor, dorkiness, and resulting sense of humility? I feel like puns and bad jokes had generally been a special part of the culture of early technologists. It's a little sad to see that give way to a kind of self-important seriousness.

But this isn't the field of computer science, it's HN. HN has developed its own distinct culture, as any long-running online forum does.

Don't be sad. The one context doesn't really apply to the other because these communities are so different in size and cohesion.

It isn't a question of humor, but of stock humor, which grows like crabgrass on the internet and quickly takes over. I think scott_s got it right years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289. Humor that clears the signal/noise threshold does fine here.

Fair enough. Thanks for the input, dang.

> Here, I expect a certain sort of signal - insight from experienced and intelligent people working hard on interesting technical problems.

In a comment thread about somebody donating? You must be disappointed often.

Actually, your priggish comment is way more of a buzz-kill in terms of what I expect / hope to find while browsing HN than the spontaneous demonstration of chain-reaction altruism evinced elsewhere in this thread.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com