A forum that disallows jokes? | Hacker News Reader

A forum that disallows jokes?

5 pointsphendrenad25 comments

I've been noticing that the quality of discussions in my usual forums (Reddit, HN, FB groups) has been decreasing lately. The number of jokes and meme replies have been increasing relative to serious discussion. For example: If you ask a serious question in a (seemingly) serious subreddit, at least 1 in 4 of the responses will be some pop culture reference with some incredibly tangential connection to your query.

So I'm thinking, if this is bothering me, it must be bothering enough other people that maybe people have created communities where these kinds of low-effort posts are against the rules. Does anyone know of any place like that?

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Do you mean besides here on HN? Humor isn't against the rules here, but low-effort/low-information comments are highly discouraged.

> If you ask a serious question in a (seemingly) serious subreddit, at least 1 in 4

Isn't that how Reddit has always been? I'm seriously asking. I gave up on Reddit years ago, so honestly don't know how things have changed between then and now. Maybe there was a "it's better" stretch in there somewhere.

Standard summertime slump, been the norm on the internet since the rise of the big forums. Also election season in the US which never helps. The small specialized forums seem to be good at staying on topic but also tend to lose much of their already limited traffic in the summer. Reddit and FB could be different and showing a general trend and impending death, I avoid sites with infinite scroll and/or screens filled with recommendations so have never used them.

If the state of the internet is irritating you go do something else, check back in a couple weeks, repeat until things get better or the internet ceases to be a part of your life.

I want an ML model that can squash image memes on Mastodon. I have a long list of keyword blocks against the hateful content that

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-politics-has-...

warns you about but hateful image memes (1) evade the blocks and (2) get shared disproportionately, even by people who should know better. Personally I am happy to see all the images memes go so just something that blocks images with prominent text in them would go a long way.

Tell me joke about ADHD.

ChatGPT:

Why did the person with ADHD bring a ladder to the bar?

Because they heard the drinks were on the house!

Aside from it being off-topic, what in the world does that have to do with ADHD? Strict rule-following and inability to understand idioms is stereotypically (and of course often inaccurately) associated with autism, not ADHD. A proper joke about ADHD would be something like,

Why did the person with ADHD bring a ladder to the bar?

Because they were trying to fix a light that went out and they'd fixed it after they put their phone somewhere far away so they couldn't get distracted but then they remembered that they had to go get the groceries so they did - well, some of it anyway, they forgot a fair amount of the things they were supposed to get - and then they remembered they'd forgotten about the ladder so they went back to put it away and right after they'd started hauling it away, they remembered that they were supposed to meet with some friends at the bar so they went to the bar.

It's not a very good joke, of course (listen, coming up with jokes on the fly is hard!) but it's much better. ChatGPT can't even get its stereotypes right.

(It is interesting that it used 'they' for the person. I'm all for it, but I was expecting it to use 'he', as that presumably comes up more than they in conversation/jokes.)

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