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Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for reading, Viktor!

>I'm less bullish on images, unless they are profoundly relevant to the text. Illustrations for the sake of having illustrations are no bueno in my opinion. You want to reduce distractions and visual noise.

I'll respectfully disagree on this one. You can overdo images, but I think readers find a wall of text intimidating and visually too boring, but this is a matter of taste.

>Images should above all never be funny.

I strongly disagree with this. It's like saying a technical blog post should never have jokes.

Why should an image never be funny?

I think you absolutely can mix humor and useful technical insights. xkcd is probably the best example, but there are lots of authors that complement their writing with humor, both in images and in text.

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I think you can be funny, but only in posts that are made to be funny. xkcd is primarily intended as comedy and that's fine.

Mixing humor into serious communication comes at the expense of authenticity. It's difficult to know what an author really means when they mix attempts at humor into the writing (and this is often deliberate, if someone makes a particularly spicy political remark, it's usually in the form of a joke, in order to shield from potential backlash). Overall it's a style of writing that feels sophomoric and insecure, as though the message itself isn't enough so there's a need to crack jokes to compensate. This successfully distracts from the message you're trying to convey, ... at the expense of clarity.

> Mixing humor into serious communication comes at the expense of authenticity.

Only if you're authentically humorless. ;-)

I wouldn't say never under any circumstance to do this, a pun or a joke occasionally creeps into my posts as well, though I feel this is definitely a less-is-more thing.

You sometimes find texts where you get the feeling the author almost expects a sitcom laugh track over the post, and funnies are crammed into every available crevice.

To put it in perspective, I would note that the article title specifies "how to write blog posts", plural, not merely "how to write a blog post", singular. In other words, you're promoting a body of work, or for lack a better term, a "brand". If you want your brand to be authentic, it needs to reflect your personality. Thus, I think there is leeway for humor, even sarcasm, meandering, rambling, if that's what you tend to do. If you can establish a brand, an audience, then readers will stay with your blog posts because they were written by you, in spite of your style, or perhaps due to your style. Ultimately, of course, you need something interesting and/or important to say, but you don't need to present it robotically. Unless you are a robot! The negative oneth law of robotics is that a robot must not attempt humor.

Humour can absolutely feel forced and insecure, however it can be a great tool to help deliver a point. Done well humour can help with the flow of a presentation or text, done badly it jars. You have to know your audience and keep your humour on topic: "street jokes"* are almost never going to work in your favour.

I read a really interesting book* about the topic a while back where the authors delve into why humour works and how to find a style of humour that works for you. Unfortunately there are places imo where they fall into their own trap of trying too hard, but honestly it serves to prove the point.

* https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Street%20Jok...

* https://www.humorseriously.com/

Steve Yegge's (in)famous Google platforms rant and his other early essays is a counterexample I would think. It was taken down long ago but there's an archived copy at https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 .

For sure a HN comment should never have jokes: instant downvotes. Watch this space...

I know you're kidding, but I think it's actually more nuanced.

Jokes in HN comments typically don't play well if the whole point of the comment is to make a joke, but if you make a joke in service of a substantive point or attach a joke to an otherwise meaningful comment, there's usually a good response.

I've come to appreciate HN's cultural norms around jokes because if you compare discussion to something like reddit, the top comment is often just a joke or a pop culture quote and then a massive thread of people just talking about the joke or reference rather than the actual story. I think HN's norms do a better job of fostering curious discussion.

I think HN can be quite forgiving when it comes to jokes, as long as they are genuinely funny and fresh. What doesn't go well is predictable reference humor and tired old memes.

Unfortunately for me, that's all I got. No quarter for being a geezer (76).

The HN version of that is that the top comment is often an analogy and then a massive thread of people just talking about the analogy rather than the actual point.

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