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Comment by 101001010101 | Hacker News Reader

There we go again. Sense of humour is penalised on HN.

It is just the (unfortunate) tendency for humor or snark-only comments to devolve into a thread of equivalent snark or hand-slapping that people worry about. So the response is to slap content-thin replies down immediately before they blossum into something worse... Even if they were clever.

I'll give you a pity upvote.

It's not sense of humor that's penalized, though. It's comments without content. (Generally.)

Thanks. I've learnt the lesson now. I can understand why that's a good rule.

Am I the only one who thinks these titles are too often unoriginal, suggestive and often conclusive? And sometimes the conclusions in the title are not even supported in the article.

It's not just HN. It's everywhere on the web.

I just don't get it.

You aren't the only one, but that's a harder problem to solve as I there are a limited number of mods and people understandably want their posts read. The public high humor bar and one or two post commentary seem to work well for keeping HN only half way over the shark. I upvoted you to make up for it.

It's called link bait.

I guess the reasoning for it is that HN shouldn't be Reddit.

Then again, I've gotten away with humor many times. Actually, some of my highest karma comments are humorous in nature.

Examples:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3301212

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3299170

But that's not even humor just for its own sake - it's actually rather insightful. Which is why it's correct that it wasn't downvoted.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

So the take-home message is that HN isn't Reddit. One should be a witty smart-alec rather than a funny wise-ass.

I don't think that's the right conclusion. The correct conclusion is, I think: What you say should add something non-trivial to the conversation. If what you have to say is funny, that's a bonus.

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