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Comment by jfruh | Hacker News Reader

These loathsome people have no respect for Britain's glorious history or traditions. Real British patriots use cricket bats on their looting spree.

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I admit I laughed, but this comment belongs more on reddit than here.

As a recent Reddit convert who would like to follow the rules, why?

I don't want to speak for him, but I'll give my opinion of why:

Reddit tends to be overrun with memes and jokes, and HN has always been more about lively discussion and facts. Reddit used to be like that a couple of years ago.

Because it is easier to create slapstick than meaning.

Humor may be a part of life and discourse, but in certain cases, and especially on the internet, it distracts from the real issue at hand, as most slapstick fails to convey meaning. If you can make me laugh and then think, then more power and karma to you, but most of us are unable to produce such witty insight on the fly all the time. We try. We fail, and we spam. That's why HN doesn't like slapstick jokes. If one person starts using slapstick then it creates a chain reaction that distracts from the real issue at hand.

Such slapstick doesn't create meaning. It ends up destroying it.

I hope that made the issue clear to you.

The initial criticism and long discussion any time someone cracks a joke isn't much of an improvement.

Except that it at least prevents the discussion devolving into a long chain of jokes, like you see on Reddit, and generally keeps this kind of thing to a minimum overall on HN.

There's a place for those chains of jokes, and that's mostly on Reddit (which I enjoy browsing often). But I would prefer to keep the discussion here on HN a bit more meaningful.

Linking one of my other replies in this subthread is better than trying to come up with a unique answer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2865270

I think mkr-hn's point, though, is that Reddit may have joke chains, but HN has "tell-people-why-they-should-not-joke" chains. They're probably both equally time-wasting (this whole thread is a good example, and yes I'm aware of the irony of adding to it. Shit happens.)

Ah, but we also have threads with neither, or threads where the jokes have simply plonked to the bottom of the page with no discussion.

HN is allergic to humor. It's not entirely unfounded, but sometimes people take it too far.

It's not allergic; jokes are just off-topic here.

I like good jokes, but when I want some, I go to bash.org or the like ('Humour' folder in my GReader has more feeds than 'Technology'); but HN is not for jokes, it's for good discussion, so let's keep it like this.

I find that HN's comment policies seem much more relaxed on the weekends.

I find HN's comment quality relaxes on the weekends too.

I find that HN's post quality relaxes on the weekends, too. ;-)

There seem to be a lot more reposts and borderline-spammy self-promotion or poorly disguised press releases.

Memes are the culprit, not genuinely humorous jokes. The pun and joke tangents on Reddit are the best thing on the Internet.

I think you might be right in that... unique humor is rare enough that it certainly doesn't threaten to overwhelm a site, and it might even represent an increase in overall conversation-intelligence.

Memes, on the other hand, are repeated endlessly. Perhaps still funny, but it's the repetition that drives people away and dumbs down threads, because it contributes literally nothing, but it does distract. It also turns the place into an echo chamber - others were very likely thinking the same thing - and group-think is dangerous.

Well, they are supposed to be immigrants or descendants of 1st generation immigrants so your comment may not apply.

Pish, the only people who love cricket more than the Brits are the people in the ex-colonies. It's huge in the Caribbean and South Asia.

Well if anything, immigrants, who choose to move their whole lives to Britain, should love Britain and its traditions even more than random British folks who happen to be born there.

Being brought up in a certain culture is a pretty powerful influence on who you are and what you like.

And people who choose to immigrate to a country may do so for a variety of reasons; I know a number of anglophones who hate living in Germany and are only here because of work.

I don't think that's true at all. I suspect the vast majority of people emigrate for economic reasons, not because they like another country's traditions.

Which is why the USA today follow the traditions of Native Americans...

I can assure you that this issue is not specific to immigrants or immigrant communities. The problem is much more general. Multiculturalism, I believe, is a good thing but there also needs to be a positive common culture. Unfortunately there isn't one to speak of. Britain is full of parallel societies and recently the main divide, that is being that is being highlighted recently, is the divide between normal citizens and those that happily and deliberately choose themselves above others. This is merely a dramatic and serious symptom of a problem that has been growing for some time.

I would expect a degree of local variation in the choice of ad-hoc melee weapons. Here in Scotland I would expect golf clubs to be more popular, perhaps shinty sticks in the Highlands.

As for myself I have a rather nasty looking ice-axe somewhere...

An ice-axe? You are aware, aren't you, that there is a difference between bludgeoning someone and brutally murdering them? Because with an ice-axe, you're going to have a hard time not engaging in the latter.

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