Comment by bmacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmacho | Hacker News Reader

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> An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour.

> HN is like that.

HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging literally everywhere else, catpost half drunk and high, noone cares really, from the small subreddits and discord servers and fb groups to the big subreddits, discord servers, fb groups.

> But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonalds: a generic commercial space built around spending money.

We must have a different internet, every other place I know is full of personality and total unique, people repeat the same sets of inside jokes over and over. HN is way the driest and most soulless.

> HN is way the driest and most soulless.

Well if you are looking for memes and catposts, yeah, the S/N ratio here is quite low.

Honestly I think of those things as noise, so I see S/N of HN as much higher. I can always go elsewhere for the vibes.

My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated "soulless" HN.

It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all. There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of jokes and fun. One thing that keeps immature and rude people away is precisely the "dullness" that the post above speaks of. People get tired and move on, leaving the place clean and tidy for others to use.

HN has problems of course; downvote bullying is one of them. I'm not saying HN is perfect, but I'd rather not turn it into Reddit or Youtube. So I don't know where this leaves HN between the "pub" and "commercial street".

I think HN is fine as it is.

I come here because it is one of the very few places where you can have interesting discussions and read interesting comments from people with a similar intent and interest.

There are many very different kinds of humor. I think HN generally allows some "insightful" or "never thought of it that way" jokes. Which is probably a narrow subset of humor in general and often requires quite a lot of knowledge about the subject matter.

Only accepting humor if it's sufficiently serious is poser behavior. It reeks of insecurity.

Some of the most brilliant people in history also had an often juvenile sense of humor. Hacker culture was born out of puns and memes and Discordianism and Monty Python references.

But we don't do that here. We're serious people having serious discussions on serious topics. Look at how serious we are. Like that monocle guy meme, except replace the glass of wine with a can of Gamersupps mixed with adderall.

I think some of that stuff also works, if it is at least somewhat ambitious. Say, "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" is absurd and humorous but gets a lot of appreciation.

The library, the café or the debate club maybe.

The café was the first pub-like place where people did mostly not drink alcohol. Reportedly, it was an inportant place for the enlightenment period of history. Let's not oversell HN here, though...

Central European cafes sell spirits, too. A cognac makes a fine accompaniment to a coffee. It is foreign franchise coffee places like Starbucks don't sell alcohol at all, and that is a major part of why they feel so foreign.

They do, but the general atmosphere is far less boozy anyway.

Some years ago, a friend introduced me to caffè corretto - espresso with grappa. Pretty good stuff, too.

I prefer it this way. I would love to see original jokes on HN, but the issue is that if you allow "jokes" in general, there's a flood of low-effort repetition of popular phrases or comments where the only "comedic" value is that they've forced something into a cliche sentence structure. That feels more soulless than the way HN is, because comments get so samey. You see the same effect sort of start to creep in on certain political posts, where people feel that they can achieve a cheap sense of attention and comradery for expressing a trite idea instead of a joke (comments that mostly amount to "Elon Musk is a mean man! Who else agrees???")

On HN jokes are possible, but they've got to be quite good, and are typically best included as seasoning to a comment rather than as freestanding comments of their own. I've done this myself, notably in my Pompeii comment of a few years ago, which was well-received (better than most of my efforts):

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133112>

Dang's written on this many times, typical:

Personally, when I read Reddit, I'm in awe of how good the best jokes are. The problem is that you can't have everything; with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor. HN's tradeoff is to optimize for signal-noise ratio, so that stuff gets hammered particularly hard.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696013>

People complain about HN's humorlessness, and they're right to a point. The trouble is that with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor, and HN wants to optimize for signal/noise ratio. It's not that we're killjoys—we like jokes and laughing—it's that the signal/noise problem is hard.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7503356>

He's specifically pointed to a take of scott_s from 2009 several times:

people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289>

> HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out.

Jokes regularly get upvoted here, the bar just happens to be a bit higher than inane Reddit pun threads.

There are no jokes in here, but HN definitely has a posting/comment "culture", a vibe, as the OP calls it, that's for sure.

For example I could never understood how come the rationalist thing was not derided to the moon and the back, especially after that crypto debacle with the Bahamas guy. But while there was a slight reaction shorlty after the fact that rationalist mindset has returned here in full force.

That’s the thing I appreciate _most_ about HN. The focus is on shop talk. Discuss science, tech, philosophy and other interesting topics without a constant stream of nonsense.

I find it very difficult to not reply on HN with a quick joke or pun or flame with no substance, but I don’t, usually.

I really like the high S/N ratio. It’s why I come here every day.

I see jokes here often enough, but they have to be tasteful, original and clever. What doesn't fly here is the lazy reddit style of joking where you just quote some lame meme or movie quip for the millionth time.

> Post Valuable Content, or GTFO.

Right, that's the vibe. And it's fantastic.

Sometimes I feel this way and then I come across a post where dang hasn’t gotten around to blowing away the low effort joke comments. Turns out it sucks

“catpost half drunk and high”

Is the theme of our online pub

'Miaowtual Assured Destruction'

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