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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: Is it just me or does this reddit-style mugging for karma not really belong on HN?

How would you describe a "reddit-style mugging for karma"?

I didn't find the post you're referring to as having added anything additional to the conversation and I also didn't find it entertaining, which I believe was the poster's goal.

However, I wasn't struck with some kind of "this is a bad thing from other platform" vibe.

I appreciate your comment, even if you didn't mine.

Thanks.

I think it got a valid thought across. It works as a sort of shorthand. Would have been 3x longer in essay form.

> It works as a sort of shorthand. Would have been 3x longer in essay form.

beering’s sibling comment made essentially the same point in direct expository form, and was much shorter, so I disagree with the suggestion that that rambling narrative is any sort of shorthand.

I think “decorum” around here is to strive for some kind of unified voice similar to The Economist. I’ve tried some humor or exaggerated voice and it is rarely appreciated with upvotes.

One thing I have learned is HN readers like Weekend at Bernie’s—-where my tongue in cheek defense of the film garnered the most comment upvotes I’ve ever received.

I upvoted that comment. And I'll upvote this one for mentioning it. That's a great movie.

Not supposed to do this, but I'll spend those upvotes: lol.

Economist, you wish.

The main problem with humor on HN is that it's just too easy to find humor anywhere on the internet, but there's no other news site where you can critically discuss the news itself.

Also on Reddit it's frustrating when I'm writing something informative and it gets hidden between the memes and the jokes, so I tend to stick to jokes there.

Why do you think this is an attempt at humor? I would say this is what is often referred to as a thought exercise.

🆒 Upvoted purely on the Weekend at Bernie’s reference.

How did you get an emoji on HN?

⭐ I assume via the unicode emoji set?

I tried a copy-paste from KCharSelect, but it doesn't work.

Only certain ones work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482991

That’s an accurate description, and, as someone tempted to go for humor, I think HN’s constraints are valuable for me.

I’ll often have a knee-jerk post that’s either funny, caustic, or redundant. I find things go best here (with some ups and downs) when I focus on providing genuine info or insight that others aren’t likely to already possess.

This pressure is a Good Thing imo.

I would agree with you - mostly when I comment here it's about something that I have direct, professional experience with. Either education, rural living, low income folks, or farming.

Otherwise I tend to just ask questions to help me understand the article from people who actually know.

But my first reaction to most articles is a dick joke. That belongs on reddit, not here.

>How would you describe a "reddit-style mugging for karma"?

Normally an extreme appeal to emotion. In this case excessive use of caps-lock and a fictional narrative that doesn't substantiate itself.

I get what you're saying. The main reason I hate 'The martian' was that to me the whole book sounded like the above post. Like it was written by someone on Reddit.

It doesn't belong anywhere.

Genuine Question: Does this thought process of summarizing the shenanigans we see in the world from entities like FB not serve to drive home a quick idea, without having to read pages and pages of text to get the point across not have a place.

I have been on HN for more than a decade. I tire of the higher-than-thou bullshit where a dialog of context for various subjects is shunned from some taboo on delivery of the premise.

So I reject your position.

Would you like me to cite things that I know personally about FB, or cite every single compacted reference made in that comment at great length so you can feel superior in your understanding that you may not have?

I mean -- FFS - understand that there are people who want to make a condensed comment on shit that happens in the tech field but I don't want to write a diatribe wit ha bibliography on why "because screw, them, that's why" is a salient summary.

(See: on HN "google deep-sixes usenet" on FP today)

I think the nuance is actually critically important, because degrading people -- even powerful ones -- down to caricatures robs us of the understanding we need to solve these problems.

Exactly. If it were so obvious then we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. There are reasons why things got to be this way and we have to understand them to progress.

Caricatures do not rob you of anything. They emphasize grotesques or background features to the point of extracting them from invisibility.

> Does this thought process of summarizing the shenanigans we see in the world from entities like FB not serve to drive home a quick idea, without having to read pages and pages of text to get the point across not have a place.

Maybe for some people. I'm honestly not at all sure what you hoped to communicate with your previous post.

Your post has an extremely pretentious tone, use the words everyone else uses if you want to be clear. You don’t sound smart using words like salient or diatribe when the simple words can do the trick.

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