Hacker News Reader

Ajax started with Al Gore, without whom the internet would have never been invented :p

Wow everybody serious on ycombinator. Can't even make a joke about Al Gore anymore.

It's not that everyone's serious, it's that this community's greatest fear is that HN will get overrun by frivolous comments and other weeds. As a result, one of the tradeoffs that's evolved is that people reflexively downvote jokes. (Non-funny jokes get hammered particularly hard.) It's best not to take it personally and work on one's noise/signal ratio.

I've mostly avoided trying to be funny on HN, but I've been voted up for cracking wise on a few occasions, and have voted up things that made me genuinely laugh.

It's a dreary business trying to analyze humor, even more so to analyze what kind of humor plays well at Hacker News, but I'd say the more original the joke, and the more the joke makes you think afterward, the better it will do.

As an aside, my goodness, this is such an HN comment.

That's because that joke stopped being funny 10 years ago.

Worse: it's been more than fourteen years since Gore's original awkward wording, and surely the jokes about it weren't funny for 4+ years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com