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Comment by Simplicitas | Hacker News Reader

Is JavaScript a language? <grin>

Please don't use HN comments for posting low-quality jokes, even if (perhaps "especially if") they're considered acceptable/appropriate for other communities.

Can you point to some specific guidelines used to judge low-quality vs high-quality jokes for HN purposes? Or are we suppose to go by your personal and subjective opinion of low-quality vs high-quality comedy material?

In this case it seems pretty clear. If you're not sure you could try reading more posts before posting. You should be able to pick up the general vibe/tone.

I found the comment funny. Since the purpose of a joke is to be funny this makes it high quality as far as I am concerned. If you didn't find it funny, I guess you would consider it low quality. The point is that judging comedy and jokes is so subjective and personal as to make any such rule regarding quality a joke itself. You can ban all jokes or mandate that jokes can't contain racist, sexist, ageist, or other such potentially offensive content but trying to filter jokes based upon quality is a bit ridiculous.

AFAIK there aren't specific guidelines but posts like the grandparent are normally moderated down. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2965166) is an example of well-received humor; it's one of the top rated posts.

are there hn hall monitors that I'm not aware of? like why are you policing people's jokes? For the life of me I will never understand why people voluntarily take on the mantle of authoritarian. Do you feel like you're contributing to something by censuring someone for a joke?

I get how it could come across that way, but cxr's comment is part of a long tradition of trying to avoid lame internet humor on HN. It's not because people don't like jokes - they just want to avoid the sort of jokes that grow like crabgrass and end up choking out more interesting discussion.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

the archetypal censure of jokes grows like crabgrass just as much as jokes grow like crabgrass (because they're both low effort).

I thought it was funny

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