Ask HN: Does the No-Humor Policy Have Unintended Consequences?

"I just posted "Nerdy Cute Girls. In T-Shirts" and it was deleted within minutes."

This is as it should be imo. (No I didn't flag that post - didn't see it even but if I had seen I would have flagged it. )

"the post wasn't controversial or off-topic"

Of course it is offtopic. Read the guidelines. Why would anyone come to HackerNews to see "cute girls" in T shirts with "funny" jokes on them?

"Can we share jokes and light-heartedness every now and then as long as we identify in the title what it is?"

Please, please, please don't. Plenty of options out there for people who want these things. If there aren't and you think there is a need, create one. (Hey startup idea?)

The answer to

"I'm just thinking that I've become much less happy over the last two years, and hanging out in a joke-free zone with a bunch of Mr. Spock wannabes might be part of that."

might be to hang out in other forums dedicated to posting jokes with no "Spock like" [1] people, or even better, meet non "Spock like"people who make you laugh in the real world. I have plenty of idiots sending me lame jokes and they don't make me laugh. Laughter in my life comes from interacting with funny/humorous people in the real world.

The last thing this HN user wants to see is to see "[Joke] blah" posts here. I for one will mercilessly flag any of these.

I have filters for idiots who send me jokes by email. If I can get filters for HN, i.e, if I can make specific posts/users/topics "dispappear" in my view I wouldn't mind so much.

Just my personal opinion but you did ask "What do you guys think?"

[1] I don't think of HN users as "Spock like" at all fwiw.

I have filters for idiots who send me jokes by email

* I don't think of HN users as "Spock like" at all fwiw*

Ah, the irony.

"I have filters for idiots who send me jokes by email

Ah, the irony."

Not really. Let me try again emphasizing some words. I don't like ---> idiots <---- mailing me lame jokes . Your "nerd girls in funny t-shirts" is ultra lame, for e.g. but there are some people who email such things to me without me ever asking for them, and in spite of requests not to send them to me. "Oh but this is so funny you have to read it .."

I do have filters for such people and posts. They get to send cheesy stuff , I get to ignore cheesy stuff, everyone is happy.

I know and interact with a lot of humorous people in real life and face to face. Being (genuinely) funny in real life (vs sending of something scraped off the Internet to a few dozen email addresses) takes some doing, or at least genuine insight.

Is "avoiding cheesy jokes in email and HackerNews" such a strange concept? I think you interpret "Spock like" to mean "people not like Daniel Markham", the lone human in a world of Vulcans ;-).

You might like getting lame jokes (sometimes with pretty girls wearing TShirts) in your email. Nothing wrong with that. Other people don't. Nothing wrong with that either.

But if that makes them "Spock like" in your world view, then so be it. :-)

I'm not feeling the love here, Plink.

There is a principal-agent problem that I just described with Ed. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367176

I am sure you are a very funny person and have lots of interesting friends that send you good jokes. Hopefully I'm not on your idiot list.

There was no commentary intended towards HN'ers except we have a tendency sometimes to be overly-analytical when lightening up a bit might be better. That's not "you guys" that's "us guys" The question was a variation on "to what degree is that useful on HN?"

So apologies if I offended anybody. I interpret Spock-like as the well-meaning and useful application of the maximum amount of brainpower and logical thinking possible to solve problems. Which is the amazing part of this community. All good things, however, have not-so-good aspects about them.

Your "principal-agent problem" seems to reduce to (emphasis mine)

"But once it became a place to hang out, my goals and the site's goals diverged."

The P_A problem is a little different.

[wikipedia] "In political science and economics, the principal–agent problem or agency dilemma treats the difficulties that arise under conditions of incomplete and asymmetric information when a principal hires an agent, such as the problem that the two may not have the same interests, while the principal is, presumably, hiring the agent to pursue the interests of the former."

The key word is "hire" or "employ".

If you enjoy a site (or a book or a movie) at certain age say, and your outlook changes for whatever reason, that isn't really a "Principal Agent problem". Your tastes changed. That's all. Happens to all of us.

So anyway, after your post got deleted, you asked HN if it was ok to post "cute nerds girls with T shirts with jokes printed thereon" and you specifically asked "what do you guys think?". Now you are getting an answer from various people including me.

I (and I don't speak for anyone else) don't expect HN to change continuously to meet my changing expectations. If my tastes change so I value a life full of mystery and danger should HN follow suit and become more mysterious and dangerous? What about the other HN user whose tastes changed to valuing a life of extreme clarity and certainty?

HN has a focus which is of value to me today. If it changes to some kind of lame humour, look-at-pretty-women site I will leave (and others will no doubt continue or join). If I suffer some brain damage/undergo a radical personality change etc and decide to give up on hacking startups and focus on butterfly collecting, say, I would not spend time on HN. Sure I can ask it to change I guess.

Fwiw, I am not insulted by "Spock like". I was just amused with your interpolating it with someone setting a filter for lame jokes and calling it "irony".

Thanks for the answer. We have no disagreement. You are not sharing me with anything that I do not already know. I do not expect HN to change to meet my expectations, I understand the value of focus, and I appreciate the feedback. It's all good.

As far as the Spock thing, happy to amuse you, if you are truly amused. For some reason, your comments sounded angry. It sounded like you were more interested in talking about what my goals or reasons were than in the question about humor, technology, and social sites in general. I don't mind explaining -- in fact I'm happy to especially if you thought I was slamming the readers here, which I most definitely wasn't doing. But I didn't get a counter-thesis, suggestions, or much of anything useful in our chat. Perhaps I missed something. I'm glad HN is topical and self-policing. I hope it stays that way. Long-term use may have unintentional side-effects. What's your opinion on that and suggestions for other readers? (repeating the topic)

Let me assure you, I bear you no ill will, I wish you well, I could care less about analyzing your intentions/goal/reasons etc are :-).

I am not angry and I don't see where I "sound" that way. I do think your submission was a cheesy one, violating HN guidelines, and more importantly, hardly insightful. It is true that I don't think you have much of a "thesis" (beyond the inapplicable Principal Agent concept) to counter.

"Long-term use may have unintentional side-effects. What's your opinion on that and suggestions for other readers? (repeating the topic)"

I am happy with HN's focus on startups, tech and stuff of interest to hackers/of intellectual interest to them. Any unhappiness I have with HN is due to (perceived) deviations from that focus and I don't want HN to include "pictures of pretty girls in TShirts with lame jokes" or otherwise focus explicitly on "humour".

I don't have any suggestions for "other readers" beyond "Stick with the HN guidelines. Please don't post such "humour" here. Please go elsewhere for such things. The Internet is a big place and there is a site for everyone" (repeating the answer)

You asked a question and got an answer. Do with it what you will. Continuing this thread (it just triggered my thread depth tripwire) would be a disservice to other readers and so I am done with this thread.

Thanks for reading and Have a great day!!

correct. the comparison to Spock is highly...logical.

The hacker news unwritten rule for humor seems to be:

  Laugh at something you can find anywhere else ---> flag
  Laugh at something that makes you think, too  ---> upvote

I love a good joke as much as the next guy, but I really love "hacker humor", something that makes you think, too. Something that non-hackers may not even understand, not because it's an inside joke, but because they haven't bothered to raise their level of thinking to "get it".

About once a day, I read something here that really makes me laugh out loud. Usually something very clever coming in from left field. Something I would never find anywhere else.

I have often typed "humorous" responses myself, but I usually think better and just close my browser before submitting. Then again, I often just let 'er rip.

You got me to thinking so I went to searchyc.com and listed my comments sorted by descending points, looking for "humorous" responses that did get upvoted. Here are a few examples of what others seem to have appreciated:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025798

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926644

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086527

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202154

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829338

Thanks Ed. This is great feedback. On topic, with practical advice that can be followed.

I find that I edit myself with humor much more than other things, especially on HN. Interestingly enough, this seems to have carried over to real life, with not such good results. Sometimes you just need to be yourself.

There is a principal-agent problem here as well. HN (or any other site) exists for some sort of narrow market segment. I know I came here because I wanted to go to one place to search and discuss items of interest to startups. From that idea the site has evolved into "stuff that interests hackers", mainly because there is only so much material you can mine using the narrower niche.

However, and this is interesting in terms of growth-for-content-sites, the reason I stayed wasn't because the topic area widened up, it was because then it became a place to hang out with other hackers in the startup community, which I _also_ found useful.

But once it became a place to hang out, my goals and the site's goals diverged. The site's goals is still to provide some kind of content niche that it does well. That, after all, is what makes it useful. My goals, however, are more like the goals anyone would have in a community: camaraderie, humor, exploration of common ideas and problems, understanding of motivations, discussion of mores.

There's not a lot of room between those two goals, but there is some, and I wonder if over time the effects add up.

(I don't know the answer. I was just wondering)

There is (so far as I know) no no-humour policy. There is a humour-isn't-enough policy.

Example: That paper on the dynamics of cows. 32 points, a reasonable amount of discussion. HN-worthy because as well as being funny, it had some actual interest for, at least, a subset of HN readers.

And yes, there is a not-lame-and-trivial* policy. If some lame and trivial things make it to the front page anyway, that's a bug not a feature, and it isn't a reason to abandon attempts to keep lame and trivial stuff away.

No, HN is mostly not a source of things that will make you laugh for an hour. It's also mostly not a place to get laid, or a good place to vent about an annoying co-worker, or a good place to get constructive advice on a SF book you're writing. Not because there is anything wrong with laughing, sex, being annoyed, or writing SF, but because a community that tries to do too many divergent things at once is likely to end up doing none of them very well.

And (do I repeat myself? very well, I repeat myself) that doesn't mean that HN has a no-sex or no-annoyance or no-SF policy. If you find or create something that's genuinely interesting to hackers and posting it happens to get you laid, express exactly what's wrong with one of your colleagues, or help polish your writing, no one is likely to mind at all. But it needs some HN-relevance to belong here, and those things don't give it that.

1. It really doesn't help to have HN overlap other internet communities. Adding stuff "of interest to hackers" that isn't really about startups or hacking is a little like creating bloatware (Studies show that the people who buy our code editor use Twitter to share photos. Let's add Flickr integration! And an instant tweet hotkey!)

2. That being said, there's absolutely no rule that says that something can't be funny just because it "Gratifies my intellectual curiosity."

  There was a young fencer named Fitz,
  Whose blade was exceedingly brisk.
  So fast was his action,
  The Lorentz contraction,
  Reduced his rapier to a disc.

Question: Does Fitz's speed also reduce his opponent's rapier to a disc?

>stuff "of interest to hackers" that isn't really about startups or hacking

Maybe it is just me, but I am getting a bit tired of seeing all those posts that are only of interest to people in startups. After all, this is still "News for Hackers", not "News for Startups". I wouldn't follow it, if it was.

Now, I don't really care that much about what gets through (although posts as "this particular company has one vacancy for a programmer" are really pushing it...) but I want to make clear that it's not up to one person to decide what content is allowable here -- except if that person happens to be PG.

Jeez, I was waiting for the right moment to unload this limerick, this post seems ideal

There once was a lawyer named Rex With a diminutive organ of sex When charged with exposure He replied with composure De minimis non curat lex

This is a great way to remember this Latin phrase (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis), which by the way is of interest to HNers, e.g. you don't report small items in your IRS return.

Every day we could have one post on HN that is something like "Say something funny"

And keep the humor to just that.

It would add some balance, give us a place to vent/joke/whatever, and also give the community a place to point to if commenters got out of control on other threads

I think Hacker News should do one thing and do it well.

If you really want to laugh then there are a million and one sites to do that. We all read other sites, it's ok for you to do that too. Hacker News shouldn't be the one-stop-shop for all things interesting to DanielBMarkham. I'm not sure I would want to spend as much time there (no offense).

There's a "delay" setting in the user profile if you're spending too much time here getting all depressed. ;-)

Or maybe this… start a thread called "Ask HN: What website made you laugh today?" and get it all out in one shot.

Its hard to say it better. I have a penchant for lolcats and I go to a couple of sites with lolcats most mornings. But that is in addition to hacker news.

Definitely enjoy your humor it makes life more pleasant, but find it in appropriate places and this not one of them.

I just don’t see how what you posted[1] is all that funny. I do think that some people here on HN are quite humorless, but there are more than enough people here who will appreciate a joke if it’s a good one. If, however, you want to see more of the kind of humor you linked to I recommend surfing Encyclopedia Dramatica (NAASFW).

[1] http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/05/nerdy-cute-gi...

Now that I've seen the post in question, the easiest answer is that the submission just isn't funny.

pretty much every internet community has devolved into primarily sharing funny pictures, there arent just plenty of other places to go to find funny stuff, it is the rest of the internet.

I dont think many people think of new.yc as a humour free zone, its just the humour has to be on the side of the content, not the content itself.

Sigh. This sounds more like an argument starting.

But here goes: XKCD. Dilbert. Cute girls with funny technology T-shirts.

Explain the difference.

I am assuming that the cute girl does not somehow render technology jokes and drawings ineffective. You put an XKCD comic on a bosom, it's still an XKCD comic.

EDIT: And if you say something like "but the fact it was a girl was part of the content and not just the tech" then the point is that it's an integrated art form. The pieces have to work together. It is still tech related.

EDIT 2 (an hour later): I made the mistake here of starting to defend my actual article. This was off-topic from the question posed. I took the bait, and I should have known better.

I dont think there is an important difference.

I dont think every xkcd / bash.org / dilbert comic should be posted either, and to be honest its been a while since I remember ever seeing any of these hit the front page. (scott adams' blog posts do not count, they are content).

I mean I like all of those sites, but I have the rest of the internet in which to find them.

I don't think people would be big fans of XKCD or Dilbert posts here either.

They have been upvoted in the past (I'm not certain but I think xkcd.com might be a banned URL now though) and hit the front page.

I think there is a distinct difference between them and "hot girls in geeky tshirts" or whatever. Usually they were "on topic" or actually amusing!

The Dilbert submissions that make it to the front page are not the comic strip. They are posts from the author's blog.

The treating of women as sexual objects in an industry over-represented by men.

The integrated art form you speak of is just thinly disguised sexism. I personally don't find that interesting or funny, I suspect others don't.

<edit>I got down-voted for pointing out something sexist? Now there's a telling thing!</edit>

> But here goes: XKCD. Dilbert. Cute girls with funny technology T-shirts.

One thing I like about Hacker News is that a high percent of articles teach me something valuable about technology or business. I like that XKCD rarely if ever comes up here, even though I go to the xkcd site maybe once a month and catch up when I just want to laugh, and will likely see the most insightful xkcd comics embedded with blog posts. Likewise, a small percent of Dilbert gets linked here - most of the links are to Scott Adams' essays, some of which are pretty insightful. Likewise, cute girls in a humorous way is available everywhere, and doesn't teach on technology or business. I'll go to Reddit when I want to laugh, the Reddit frontpage usually has something funny right on it, like this one right now:

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/c6evn/winner/

Or maybe I'll go to /r/relationship_advice, which is unintentionally hilarious with blind-leading-the-blind advice, though I am forced to cringe, login, and give a drastically different opinion at times, which can be a time sink.

Anyways, long story short: Signal-to-noise ratio on practically useful things here is quite high. Maybe it's slipped a tiny bit, but it's still probably between 50% and 80% potentially valuable. It seems like it used to be 80%+ valuable, so the slip is a shame, but this has got to be the best site for both potentially practically beneficial while still be entertaining/stimulating/not too dry.

> XKCD. Dilbert. Cute girls with funny technology T-shirts.

None of them should be on HackerNews. All of them can be found on reddit, which is where I go if I'm in that mood.

Most stuff that people think is funny isn't that funny for most other people. So a humor-tolerating, polite community will most likely end up with lots of trying-to-be-funny stuff that's just tired, and signal-to-noise goes down. An option is to drop the politeness and harbor a culture where people vocally heckle things they find unfunny. Third solution is to discourage humor.

I like low humor tolerance more than having a low signal-to-noise ratio or low community politeness.

As others have said, humor can be found virtually anywhere on the internet. Hacker News is one of the few places where I know that if I see a few comments on an article, there will be actual meaningful discussion of the content rather than easy joke sniping. One reason why I've grown to like HN better than reddit is that I never know what the top comment will be, except that it will usually be a decent and generally well thought out opinion on the topic. On reddit (and other sites, I'm using reddit as an example since I'm familiar with it), the top comment is almost always an mildly amusing joke that I can predict the subject of, if not get it word for word. Anywhere on the internet, I can find laughs, but I come to Hacker News to think.

You do realize you're allowed to frequent more than one community website right? IMHO, I like that HN is kind of specialized on specific types of content. When I want more general stuff, I'll hop over to Reddit, Digg, MetaFilter, etc.

The nice thing about HN though is that we have great discussions around topics that are specialized enough they'd never get "upvoted" enough to be visible on "those other" sites.

I don't know whether this consequence is intended or not, but at times HN feels unbearably stuffy, self-important and, well, humourless.

I've always thought of hacking above all as a fun activity - in the way that posing and solving puzzles is fun ... or in the way that posing and solving jokes is fun.

Humour is all about thinking around corners, framing and reframing a set of premises, melding logic and creativity to produce surprising[1] results.

Killing humour to keep a hackers' discussion on-topic is like killing inductive reasoning to keep scientists focused on the big picture.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html

but at times HN feels unbearably stuffy, self-important and, well, humourless.

Thank you

There is plenty of room for humor here without having to resort to pics of girls in T-Shirts.

Go find the next Steve Yegge or something.

You could always register an icanhascheeseburger account.

You will get a torrent of funny pictures and the comments are about as far from Spock-like as can be found. Once you've gorged yourself and start feeling your grip on reality grow wobbly, then come back here and spend time here in the "joke-free-zone", as you put it.

I agree with your sentiment but this is because of a more general conflict between those who see Hacker News as a place about Hacker stuff and those who see Hacker News as a place for Hackers. It's an important distinction - one would allow "light-hearted" hacker stuff (like dailyWTF) and the other allows "light-hearted" general stuff (like your T-Shirts, although they are kinda borderline because they're geeky jokes but you get the point).

I think the relationship between the content of hacker news and the userbase is like an ecosystem and maintaining the fidelity of this system is necessary to preserve the mission of the community. People are attracted to hacker news because of the content and they in turn become a new source of similar content. If hacker news were to allow more lightweight material to the site then we may see users joining for that type of content and the repercussions of this I would would be undesirable. So while the perceived authoritarian nature of HN may be a bother sometimes I think it's a small price to pay to keep it the way it is meant to be.

I don't think I'm humourless, but I value HN as one of the few places on the public internet where intelligent discussion is still possible without being drowned out by regurgitated memes and fart jokes. While in theory it's possible to have both, I haven't seen it happen elsewhere.

The comparisons to Reddit are discouraged not because they are baseless, rather for fear that they may be self-fulfilling. Reddit used to feel like a community as well, and I used to enjoy reading the comments there as well. It's worth asking 'What changed?' and 'What could have been done differently?'

I just looked at your link: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/05/nerdy-cute-gi...

It struck me as a parody of the worst possible thing you could post here: non-funny, sexually stereotyped, ethnocentric, and devoid of insight; but with just enough of a hook to get a significant number of upvotes. It's soft porn with a plausible excuse. And once people saw that this was acceptable, I'm sure we'd see more of the same.

If I were the moderator, I'd have not only deleted it but emailed you to tell you that if you do it again your account will be banned. This isn't because I'm against humor, or against porn, but because I can't see the community I enjoy remaining intact while adding this sort of boorish fluff.

I don't want to pick on you too much, but did you picture the conservative religious users being amused by this, or did you set out to offend them? Did you consider how it might seem to a young female programmer to see your post on the front page? I'm very far from politically correct, but I can scarcely conceive of what you were thinking.

Like others have said, I believe that having a focused remit is critical to maintaining a community. I don't want to see jokes here just because they are funny, and possibly a little geeky. And I say this as someone who loves to tell jokes. (See http://www.google.com/profiles/btilly for proof that I tell lots of jokes. Just not here.)

Why weren't there any cute boys?

Also, is HN really the only place you hang out? You might want to try hanging out in some other places as well.

Some of us barely have time to hang out here, let alone multiple internet communities. I don't get anything done as it is...

Post one and I'll upvote it.

I started googling "funny t-shirts" just on a lark last night. After getting a zillion, I narrowed it down to "funny girl t-shirts" because I liked that better. I like girls and looking at them made the shirts more entertaining to me (This also had the benefit of going from hundreds of thousands of printed jokes on jokes to a much smaller number of actual modeled shirts). That took me to about 200 shirts. I had no idea what to do with THAT data, so I further narrowed it to nerd jokes. Which took me to about 17.

Different paths give you different results. But really the only discriminator was that they made me smile, and the topic was nerd stuff (which is why I shared here)

Hacker News. Where even the jokes have algorithms

Okay. $20 bucks says if I had posted an article on "Erlang for humorous T-shirt picture selection" I could have ran the same article with 10 lines of code at the top and it would have been a hit.

On a whim last year I searched for "atheist t-shirts" and to my delight found that there are actually quite a few available and that most of appeal to my sense of humor (mostly things along the lines of "my imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend" etc.).

Then I remembered we were going to Egypt on holiday and suddenly this didn't seem like such a good idea.

(To be fair, Egypt is a lovely place).

Intelligent humour has always done well here (mostly in comments). Banality less so. shrug I quite like that.

Also: OMG geek girls is such an old and tired "joke" I'm not surprised it was killed.

and hanging out in a joke-free zone with a bunch of Mr. Spock wannabes might be part of that.

HN makes me laugh or smile daily, perhaps you are looking in the wrong places.

There's only one thing worse than silly "FUNNY PICTURES!!! LOL!" posts and that's posts complaining about submissions of said fluff being deaded.

We all know how to use the Internet here, so we can go to any of the millions of places where that would be considered a top contribution any time we want.

How would HN women feel about 'nerd jokes on cute girls'?

The other day there was a post here on a DAAS startup that offered 'write once' memory in the vein of Amazon's S3, called 'S4'. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360436

It was very humorous, even if it was a variation on a very old theme, and I think it made the top spot on the homepage.

This one is also humorous, but not as much.

I woulnd't have flagged it, I would have just ignored it. Flags are for spam, this was clearly some work to put together, there was no offense given as far as I could see.

The cost of ignoring it if you're not interested is near zero, the cost of depriving someone else of what they might like is non-zero, and unless someone posts a page like that everyday there really is no problem.

On another note, I've seen enough DanielBMarkham posts by now to know that he was up to something, my guess is that he was planning to have this discussion and I thought this discussion and some of the responses in it was a nice insight in to what motivates people to visit a certain site.

If it is OK to put a message here that the water mains in Boston has broken (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311198) then you have to realize I'm in the Netherlands and that it is not of interest to 'the hacker community' even if you're in Boston and a hacker. The majority of us are not in Boston.

But that one sat on the front page for a long long time and nobody said a word. I didn't flag it because it did not concern me. but arguably it had a lot less to do with hacking than Daniels original post (I don't mean that in a literal sense but as a shortcut).

Lighten up.

If you are so serious about startups and making money then you shouldn't be on HN at all except for reading from Patio11 and grellas, between the two of them the rest of HN is light infotainment anyway. Have a critical look at the homepage right now and tell me why 'nerdy girls in t-shirts' is out of place there with a straight face.

Hey! Get off my lawn!

The thing I like about HN is that humor is appreciated but you have to work much harder to make it original and topical.

Posting a link to someone elses humor doesn't fit the spirit of HN ( to me ). But humorous insights in comments can be golden when well executed. And executed if not golden. I personally enjoy the challenge and the differentiation from other sites.

I wonder if on Reddit there are guys going "Hey! What is this? HackerNews?"

Well I guess that it is ok to post humor on HN as long as it is intelligent humor or gives you some insight. It's banal humor which is not desired. I see some links to DailyWTF or XKCD from time to time and no one complains.

I'm not opposed to people posting whatever they like and having the community decide via upvotes if its worthwhile. Deleting posts outright seems too heavy-handed to me.

Personally, I look to Reddit and Fark for mindless frivolity and Hacker News for more thought-provoking articles. You don't have to only hang out in the joke free zone. It's possible to participate in more than one community.

There is no reason for every discussion site to become like reedit. I am sure they would appreciate your banal humor.

I come to HN to get away from being spammed with picture posts I've seen a dozen times before.

I go to HN to learn useful stuff for web startups. I go to Reddit for nerdy humor. When websites specialize I can get what I want, when I want it.

You posted a pic spam link to your own blog.

I think the consequences were entirely intended.

So a digger, a redditor and an HNer walk into a bar.

They get drunk and have a good time.

Your assumption: HN readers only read HN.

The day that Cute Girls N Nerdy Tshirts makes HN's front page is the day I'll know that it's not just suspending in the air over the shark, but actually over it.

Now, I get what you mean. HN seems largely humorless. Everybody's trying to out-intellectualize everybody else (with a greater or lesser degree of success).

For example: People stop using contractions, or wanna/gonna. "You are" "I am" "It is" -- even you were doing it in your replies to what I'll call the 'Spock subthread' here on this item.

Other signs include the (usually incorrect) applications of rhetorical/logical fallacies, and talking about 'the facts' as if any one blog post or video could possibly convey all 'the facts' about a situation, and that which 'facts' are chosen to be presented is not an entirely subjective thing.

When I write "gonna" etc. here and use smilies, I'm pretty sure people think less of me. That's fine, cuz I know I'm smarter than they are. ;) But when I write a really hilarious essay ripping something up, and that something is related to startups or programming, it typically ends up on here one way or the other. I'm not the only one.

Then the comments are all deadly serious. Such is the cycle of life, and HN's tone, for better or for worse.

But HN isn't actually humorless, it just likes to keep it hidden under its hat... you know, the one with the special proturbation up front for our unusually prodigious forebrains.

To allow a meter of incongruity with the current culture would result in a mile of abuse. I would prefer a humorless HN than a 4Chan style ego trough (for the lulz) to satisfy people that should not be here.

I think part of the problem is how serious people take themselves. HN is a reflection of all the personalities of all those that take part in it and it exhibits a tendency to pretend to be very busy making millions of dollars, whereas actually there seems to be more interest in which celebrity is using what gadget.

If that's the choice, then I'll take the humorous post of Daniel any time over the Fake Steve jobs item currently on the homepage, at 131 points and 124 comments it must be really important, or the latest joelonsoftware or sethgoldin post that is going to make us all millionaires.

exhibits a tendency to pretend to be very busy making millions of dollars

Haha, yeah.

But, regarding Daniel's humorous post, a combination of cute girls in geeky shirts is more sad than funny, don't you think? In a meta sense:

"Why is this remarkable?"

It's like posing sleeping kittens and babies with 40s of Mad Dog. The humor is in the incongruity. Meaning...

1. We don't talk to cute girls

2. We wish cute girls wore these nerdy shirts so we'd feel validated

3. The girls who actually do wear these shirts, we don't like

4. Boooo.