Ask HN: Why doesn't HN like one liners? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why doesn't HN like one liners?

6 points1arity18 comments

Humour is proven to help you think more flexibly and creatively. Encouraging people to have a sense of humour and rewarding that frees their minds to think of more productive things, which in turn may create better quality content. A lot of workplaces use regular "games" to relieve tension, relax and change the "thinking mode" into something more playful. I completely agree with HN's stance on abuse, harassment, hate speech and negativity and am puzzled by its intolerance of oneliners and seeming lack of humour as a motif across even a small number of submissions. Given this, it's fair to ask, Why so serious, HN?

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Fundamentally it is to have a good signal to noise ratio, in the name of efficiency.

I'd rather read/parse quickly 50 insightful comments, that 300 where most of them are jokes, puns, etc.

Sure more jokes would likely give a more friendly or relaxed atmosphere, but there are already so many of these informative not-too-serious-but-fun-to-read communities, that I am grateful to have at least one place where I know the comment quality and information density is quite high.

Has the experiment been tried ?

6:1 seems too high. If that were what downvotes were currently suppressing, I feel we'd see a lot more illegal humorists slipping through this border control.

Are downvotes really that effective a filter ? For instance, if HN downvotes don't stop the haters ( under even the extreme assumption that, on the internet, there are 10 haters to every 1 netizen ), I don't think they're stopping the X times as many humorists ( or "Humorous Comment Events" ).

Which means that perhaps the noise ratio would not be so blown out by humour as is expected.

In terms of what the ideal humour ratio should be, I think something like 1:0.1 or 1:0.2 at max would be optimal. A smattering of humour.

Yes. Extensively.

The entire rest of the Internet can be considered the control group, if you like. Everywhere else allows silly one line puns to stand unswatted. And it is unbearable. Enough so that you and I are here instead.

QED.

Jokes don't necessarily make the atmosphere friendly or relaxed. Lots of jokes are in some way cynical or sarcastic, which works much better amongst friends than amongst strangers.

Jokes also make the policy of acceptability much more blurry. It's relatively easy to find broad agreement on whether a comment is true/useful/kind, than it is on whether the comment is funny.

I disagree that HN doesn't like humor. Compare the comments of this article posted yesterday on HN vs. Reddit (the one where the guy teaches his daughter CSS and has to vertically align something).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9993171

http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/3fkkh0/teaching_css_...

It's not like the HN crowd is completely stiff. But look at the ridiculous difference in post quality. Reddit is almost 100% one-liners with no substance whereas Hacker News managed to find some interesting things to discuss.

In simple upvote/downvote systems, content will always proceed towards the lowest common denominator. The moment it becomes culturally acceptable to post something low effort and obvious is the moment a high quality community dies.

The 950+ results returned from searching HN for the term [0] would suggest that, contrary to your thesis, Hacker News readers do, in fact, appreciate one liners quite a bit -- just take a look at these examples:

- Also, awk has a fun way of parsing input, which makes for very enjoyable one liners [1]

- In Vim, configuration is a bunch of one-liners and I love that. [2]

(As for your other point, however, i.e. whether HN readers appreciate humorous comments, sadly, I'm not sure how we could go about determining that...)

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8894231

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7303266

They get tiresome very quickly. I recently sat and read a Reddit/r/History discussion on Pirate-ship Democracies, the continual (and all very similar) puns & jokes about pirates littered between the interesting points got really, really annoying very fast.

In person, if you're having a discussion and someone cracks a good pun it's fine, but when you're on the internet 100+ people make the same pun, then it's really not fine, it's boring.

That might happen on HN, and then again, HN isn't reddit.

I suppose I am also curious that, if the experiment of allowing humour has not been tried, where did the idea to disallow humour come from ?

I haven't been here long enough to say when, where or why it came about. I imagine there's a fear that allowing humour will lead to this place being like Reddit (ie. swamped with more jokes than quality responses).

The one-liners I've seen people deliver here (and get downvoted for) haven't ever really been worth the read. It might only be a single comment, but reading it wastes time, copy that by a few more & you'll get sick of jokes fast. This is personally why I try and avoid Reddit, trying to follow a conversation is frustrating when every 3rd post is a witty comment with no substance but the pun.

This site was made after reddit, so I guess some of the design decisions were to copy the good things of reddit but not the bad things.

Some design decisions are written in code, like no downvote for submissions.

Some design decisions are distributed in the community, like no oneliners or jokes. (Unless they are really original and interesting.)

HN allows humor. It tends to be downvoted because it tends to be not very good, where "not very good" means that it fails to extend the content and ignores the reader. At the meta-level, downvoted humor is invariably followed by "why all the downvotes, lighten up" driving any hope of anyone learning anything about anything other than the way HN tends to work further into the weeds with a pitcher of hurt feelings.

The idea to discourage humor comes from an understanding of how online communities work and how the mores of communities shape behavior.

A lot of workplaces use regular "games"

Spolosky talks about this quite a bit in the StackOverflow/StackExchange podcasts in relation to online communities. The podcasts have been recorded from the beginning as StackOverflow was built.

The problem with regular jokes in online communities:

+ They separate the insiders from the outsiders

+ They become a focus of online activity for regular users in lieu of the public organizing principle.

StackOverflow is useful for solving problems precisely because meme-making and joke cracking is not allowed to be anyone's primary activity. The same holds true on HN, nobody is popular just because they are funny. It's not that HN doesn't like humor so much as it favors cleverness, knowledge, and insight; and most attempts at humor lack all three.

If it takes Seinfeld years to get a joke pitch perfect, what are the average HN'ers odds of doing so in 74 keystrokes? I find that the delete link is really useful whenever I succumb to the urge.

Good luck.

HN likes good one liners. Where good is defined as being so funny or insightful that you can't not laugh. A pretty high bar to meet, but it keeps the noise down. There have been a number of great one liners over the years.

Please post a few examples. I'm really thirsty to see some humour on here, and get a sense of it.

I don't know any easy way to search for one liners.

Not really a joke but it's the best example of funny-on-HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

Most of the comments of pg were oneliners (not jokes): https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg

I appreciate the no-humour approach in HN greatly. Almost every other forum is full of people trying to be funny. This basically infects the culture of the forum, and crowds out most other kinds of conversation.

I find the types of jokes people are likely to make about technology, or about interesting/engaging articles, very tedious. I also think a lot of the jokes are simply cynical.

I would much rather read comments that are earnest, than comments that were flippant.

Because one liners are never funny, especially when they're ironic.

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