Ask HN: Why no sense of humor?
Is it just me or is any humor on hacker news down voted right away?
Remember that I am not ranting about the quality of the users of reddit, but what I am trying to say is that reddit as a community has become bloated. Of course reddit does have a lot of brilliant hackers as users, but the place is not like what it used to be. I doubt that there can be serious (programming) discussions in reddit anymore. Reddit is becoming more of a Digg than anything else.
Meanwhile Hacker News is trying very hard to prevent the same thing happeneing to them. It is a low-traffic news site for programmers that has very high quality content and committed contributors. A few days ago the site was mentioned in some social websites (including reddit) and a lot of traffic came in, and guess what they did? Here is what Paul Graham suggested:
"We’ve had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.
You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter."
That is a very bold step to take, and worth it if you take the quality of the content seriously.
It is not that the people using programming reddit and hacker news are different. Even if the same person visited both the sites, he will be more inclined to post funny remarks in reddit while he will give serious opinions in hacker news. Not that there is something bad in being humorous, but being too much funny is kinda annoying.
Taken from http://www.diovo.com/2009/04/broken-windows-theory-online-co...
I have a sense of humor. It might be different than yours, but I have one. I also have a low tolerance for noise on HN. I don't come here for "teh funny." I have others places I go for that. I come here for interesting, hacker related items. I can find funny all over the internet. This is the only reliable place I know of to find good hacker news. I'd rather not spoil that.
and that's something we never want ;)
The erlang articles were mostly very interesting, and seeing a HN meme flare up and go away just as quickly, especially one that is self-deprecating in poking fun at the stereotype of the HN reader doing everything pg says, was very fun. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it.
The only kind of noise that I really hate on HN is the "hacker news sucks" crap. If you think it's too noisy, get better filters, or help out by flagging the articles that violate the TOS, up-voting the articles that are good, and ignoring the rest.
Complaining about HN in an HN comment is frankly just humorless.
I find complaining about HN (especially the "whaa to much noise") on HN highly ironic.
I like HN, and I think it's worth explaining how the community works. That includes why (bad) humor is downmodded so often.
I'm having trouble finding any variation on that joke that I've found funny since the 5th grade...
I figured HN had some strange seating in the Erlang community :)
One thing I have noticed that could be good or bad depending on the situation, but sometimes good posts I notice in new (technically relevant, different content that is truly interesting) doesn't make it to the front page. However, every 3rd+ Tech Crunch article does.
As of now, I am satisfied with the content in HN.
I like the ask-HN kinda stuff more.
That is a very bold step to take, and worth it if you take the quality of the content seriously
Haha, a bit ironic that you mention this, considering it turned into a pretty sophomoric joke...
There still are discussions I consider worth my time to read, for example: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8dsxr/is_there_...
Posting a million lines of text and then ending it with Bell-Air was funny. The first time. Same for masking a link to some site you don't expect to go. It was funny the first time they did it. Some ten years before they reused the joke for Goatse, and then for tubgirl, and then for 2g1c, and then for a Rick Roll. Kind of gets boring...
I'm sorry, but I find the whole meme-thing rather annoying. Not only does it get in the way of serious discussion, it even gets in the way of new jokes.
I don't mind seeing a joke on HN, but only if it's funny. I'd rather risk no humor on any site than stupid humor.
It would be a lot different if discussions were flat, or at least where comments weren't judged on a per-comment basis. The problem is that the most humor a voting site allows, the more the top answers get diluted. I was a hardcore Reddit user when it started going downhill; the shift happened after one or two puns/jokes were breakthrough huge successes. After that, everybody tried to get the same success.
I downvote comments that are humorous but don't add to the discussion. I also usually don't upvote useful comments that are humorous. This community is valuable because when somebody posts they're rarely being sarcastic/ironic. You get a lot of people saying things they mean at face value. Humor's downside is that it adds uncertainty to conversations.
I certainly don't think there is anything wrong with having a forum where every line doesn't play to the peanut gallery.
If you want to be funny, be interesting at the same time. If you can't, then save the joke for reddit.
A salesman, a project manager, and a programmer are kidnapped by terrorists on the way to a customer demo. The company refuses to pay ransom so they are to be executed. The kidnappers grant each a last request.
The salesman said, "I have been working very hard on a Power Point presentation of our new release and I haven't had a chance to present it yet. It's only 143 slides and 2 hours long, and I'd like to present it before I'm killed."
The project manager said, "I have developed a new methodology for implementing our new release. I'd like to present 25 flip chart pages to describe it. I will only take one hour."
The programmer said, "Kill me first."
High voted jokes also breed more of themselves. (As do highly voted comments, on, e.g., sexually gratifying oneself. Oddly enough, people often think the creeping pornification is a substitute for humor, too. We're pretty harsh on those too, thank goodness.)
Humor can be used to great effect in order to make a point--but, more often than not, it represents much less of an increase in signal and much more of an increase in noise.
I know we don't want the place to turn into Reddit or, worse, Digg, but a little humor actually improves my thought processes and analytical skills.
But every community has its culture. HN is no exception.
To further explore it, in my experience of 15 years in the tech industry or its outskirts, I think a small but vocal minority of tech types are humor-impaired, and that often has an over-large impact on any tech-oriented site.
But who knows? I'm just spouting off ideas.
For that, I go to reddit. When I feel even more impish, I hit digg.
Basically, there's a place for humor and there's a place for constructive dialogue. You'd think the two would go hand in hand, but a voting system like HN proves that it's a tough thing to do.
Here's how it works. Give people a soapbox, a place for them to develop their own writing styles and personalities, and humor and pathos tend to develop. I see it in every blog that I read and like: every voice is different and unique because they're able to experiment and develop themselves, and then they get an audience.
On Hacker News, users are depersonalized. That is to say, Hacker News is about the community as a whole rather than as unalone or knightinblue. Our contributions are valued, but only as long as we're being a part of the community. Say you're having problems with an ex-wife. Say I've been learning how to play basketball. These things may be a big part of our lives, but they don't have a place in Hacker News. So we leave a part of ourselves at the door when we post here. In reward, we have a community that has thus far managed not to turn petty and immature, where you can discuss things with a lot of people without there being memorable characters and personalities distracting from the conversation.
In fact, the people whose names I do know tend to be ones I wish I didn't know. Certain people stand out to be because they do use HN in a way outside the norm. Some people I remember for being over-the-top sarcastic and scathing. Some people use Hacker News like a soapbox, an attention-getter space. I'm sure that in some ways, my own habit of writing lengthy posts stands out and irritates some people, because I'll often go into more detail than seems warranted with an initial post.
So the emphasis in what you said is dialogue. When an individual is speaking, personality becomes a big thing. But in a productive conversation, personality becomes a deterrent that distracts from the important details.
I'm missing a coherent discussion, instead I'm often stuck in a game of block & attack. One young hacker wants to show the other young hacker that he is superior. Personally, I find this is just noise... I seek comprehension.
And then there is the difference between an elegant attack, which you can learn from, or the usual trying to misinterpret a statement in their favor, which is called framing.
A sequence of arguments going back and forth between two people, on the other hand, are essentially the back and forth of a duet playing separate themes (that, ideally, mix at the end). While certain sorts of arguments are non- or counter-productive (analogous to internally discordant themes), the possibility of such things occurring does not imply that this mode is not superior to single-view discourse.
The fact that discussions center on points of disagreement is not an accident, and does not imply that there is not agreement regarding most things. Disagreements are simply the portion of a topic around which someone believes that there is more information that an outside observer should consider when formulating their beliefs, whereas when there is agreement no further information is necessary, so there is no value in transmitting more signal.
The short answer is that since people, last I checked, were animals who joked, and computers were made for people, not the other way around, the site should support joking and flag/hide jokes appropriately depending on user preferences.
I'm okay with it either way. I don't think of the humorless nature of HN as being some huge asset. In fact, it makes the place stuffy and overly earnest. Dare I say artificially boring. But I understand the reasoning behind the community's standards. I just think like everything else there is a proper mix in life. Finding the right mix for a social site seems to be a critical factor.
By the way, humor doesn't completely go away. People still sneak it in here or there. You're just forced to follow it with something of value to the conversation. This eliminates the hit-and-run snarky one-liners found on so many other sites.
I always upvote something that is funny: maybe here funny isn't smart, which is wrong, or, funny is smart, which can easily be the case, but smart people who aren't funny don't want to acknowledge that others are funny.
Maybe "humour" is upvoted but "funny" is not because it's weird and uncommunal. So humour is often not appreciated because it gets too easily percieved as funny amongst the ultra-seriousness.
Maybe being in serious concentration, which gains the upvotes, people forget about their funny side in both reading and writing.
If there was a mod-filter here, or an upvote/downvote categorizer like there is at Slashdot, things would change. The direct payoff of humour is pleasure, with insight being of a different quality. There's more variety at Slashdot, and people can be more of themselves, for better and worse, and the modding style and layout promotes that diversity. Here, people downmod anything that doesn't add value to the discussion (or strongly opposes one's point-of-view) because you have to look at it, but on Slashdot, participation has it's own inherent value because of the filter.
Furthermore, if people here were identified by their real names, can you imagine how straight-jacketed most would feel, not wanting to be perceived as weird or 'funny' at any point?
Just takin' a stab.
I'm not saying voters' judgement of what's funny is perfect, but it's not too far off. I occasionally see a comment that seems funny that got voted down, but these are greatly outnumbered by ones that weren't that funny.
That is an example of humor that didn't get nuked to hell.
It's also, I humbly put forth, an example of making an counter argument, making a separate point and not being mind-numbingly boring about it.
HN, humor is not death. You can laugh a little and still have time to believe you're smarter and better than the rest of us.
It's not like your choice is either upvote or downvote, you can just leave it alone.