Satire and parody and other forms of creative provocation can be intensely vital things. But they don't work on HN. We could speculate about why, but empirically it's a property of the system: certain things make HN less interesting. High-signal provocation isn't possible here. It just leads to noise, which leads to more noise.
HN's rules aren't about propriety—they're about trying to stave off lameness. HN is an experiment in trying to remain interesting, so anything whose effects, compounded over time, make the site less interesting counts as bad.
It took me a long time to figure this out in my own posts. I hate dreary language, so I'd try to make comments that were interesting rather than lukewarm. I slowly learned that, no matter how "interesting" they seemed to me when I wrote them, provocation that leads to noise only lowers the quality of the thread.
We're not demanding that people behave themselves for convention's sake—that would be tedious and inevitably lead to a backlash. Rather, it's an optimization problem: given this system called HN, what will make it more interesting and less lame over time? Whatever the answer is, it doesn't have to do with the quality of individual comments but with their systemic effects.
The spirit in which we're asking people to work on this is not a finger-wagging one. It's more like giving a hard problem to a team.
HN's rules aren't about propriety—they're about trying to stave off lameness. HN is an experiment in trying to remain interesting, so anything whose effects, compounded over time, make the site less interesting counts as bad.
It took me a long time to figure this out in my own posts. I hate dreary language, so I'd try to make comments that were interesting rather than lukewarm. I slowly learned that, no matter how "interesting" they seemed to me when I wrote them, provocation that leads to noise only lowers the quality of the thread.
We're not demanding that people behave themselves for convention's sake—that would be tedious and inevitably lead to a backlash. Rather, it's an optimization problem: given this system called HN, what will make it more interesting and less lame over time? Whatever the answer is, it doesn't have to do with the quality of individual comments but with their systemic effects.
The spirit in which we're asking people to work on this is not a finger-wagging one. It's more like giving a hard problem to a team.
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