Ask HN: What is the role of jokes in Hacker News comments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the role of jokes in Hacker News comments?

12 pointstokenadult16 comments

I'm wondering what the community consensus is around joking comments here on Hacker News. I used HN search to look up some previous comments on the issue that appeared in earlier threads, some as recent as yesterday. What do you think? Are we looking for jokes here on HN? Or is the community looking for something else from comments? Is it a matter of distinguishing insightful or deep jokes from lame or thoughtless jokes? What do you think? I'd appreciate your thoughts on this issue.

View on HN

The best sort of jokes are those that are (a) funny and (b) implicit in some substantive comment.

Unfortunately most jokes here, as on most forums, fail on both counts. The most common way to fail (a) seems to be to recycle overused catch phrases in insufficiently novel ways.

Thanks for the reply. I was wondering, because of a rather bizarre comment I saw (and replied to) earlier today. I thought the most charitable interpretation of the comment was that it was an attempt at a joke.

There many jokes here, though they are disguised inside serious comments. My take is that you should humor to make a point, and not as the point itself.

Good:

A joke that is relative to the subject. As in replying with code one liners when another member posts one. This one is quite enjoyable.

Bad:

One liners like "That's what she said!".

Though I think a thread about hacker jokes could come in handy from time to time. We are quite the uptight community.

A British psychologist called Richard Wiseman spent a year conducting a "scientific search for the world’s funniest joke". Here is his conclusion:

"Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?”. The operator says “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says “OK, now what?”

However! In the context of Hacker News, where the goal seems to be knowledge transfer, (b) is important as the joke should be a way to frame the knowledge transfer process.

Jokes on HN are strongly discouraged. As much as people like them, their presence creates a feedback loop that drives the noise-to-signal ratio through the roof. Jokes can be made, understood and voted up very quickly. In a democratic situation like HN, this leads to a large volume of replies and up votes that quickly drowns out all relevant conversation. The more threads that feature jokes, the harder it becomes to discourage them in the future. It seems the fate of all vote-based forums to eventually devolve into a sea of memes (HN -> Reddit -> Digg). HN's anti-humor downvote brigade gets a lot of pushback, but they are so harsh because they are doing their best to hold back that tide.

If I want jokes, I go to reddit. I think, for the most part, they don't belong here.

This sort of comment highlights the problem of not showing comment scores. I agree with David, so I upvote him. However, no one knows that I agreed with David unless I specifically comment with a "+1" or something else (such as this comment). The way it is now, only those who understand the inner workings of the site's comment showing algo know that, because David's comment is (at the time of this writing) the top comment, that means that either (a) David's comment has been upvoted the most, or (b) David has a high karma, or (c) etc, etc. I wish I could just see a (46) next to David's comment - that would validate my agreement with David moreso than just "Here - have an upvote".

Your comment highlights exactly why comment scores should not be shown.

If you use comment scores as a proxy for agree/disagree you are much more likely to downvote comments you don't agree with even if they add to the discussion.

I'm ok with clever, on topic jokes on HN but in general i agree.

Merely humorous comments detract from the true comedic function of Hacker News, to satirize Reddit. I'm kidding?! As to the community, it seems to support our gracious host's objection, not to jokes as such, but to jokes based in meanness or stupidity and to the ease with which such jokes proliferate. Here is a post that quotes this objection specifically: http://www.kottke.org/09/02/the-fluff-principle-and-other-th...

Most comments that don't add substantively to the discussion seem to generate downvotes. Which is too bad, as I like the funny.

That said, it seems like it would be hard to control for only occasional (and ideally funny) jokes in a community like this -- if jokes were generally rewarded, hn could become a jokefest like Reddit, dramatically reducing the signal-to-noise ration many of us appreciate it for.

TL;DR - use jokes sparingly, and make 'em good.

(edited for a typo)

I posted a funny even though to the point response to an interesting comment here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5203967. It got 20 upvotes. So I would say it could work