I agree with you in general, but I still feel that HN has gone overboard in its hostility to humour. Notwithstanding that a witty, timely, humorous, in-context comment stands a good chance of being upvoted here, a little more levity would help HN not to take itself quite so seriously all the time.
Assuming your comment is serious (rather than some quip), I think what we're seeing is differing visions for HN.
One group (me included) enjoys some levity, as long as it's high quality and doesn't get in the way of substantial discussions.
Another group would prefer that HN avoids that entirely.
It mostly seems like a matter of taste / preference, so I'm not sure how we can come to one kind on this, shy of seeing the pro-humour approach clearly hurting the site.
Honestly, I kind of appreciate that HN tries to keep things serious. I'd hate for this site to turn into reddit where the top 5 comments in most threads are just people reciting the same played out jokes over and over.
I wouldn't mind a little more humor here, but it's hard to moderate something subjective like that.
You're forgetting HN is serious discussion for serious people or something like that. Humour in a substantive post seems fine, but usually any humour on its own doesn't fare well here.
On HN, humour is almost only ever desired if it's in combination with other content. If someone injecting a bit of humour is not quickly downvoted, then others start throwing out their "witticisms" and things degrade rather quickly. Better to nip it in the bud and potentially upset someone making an innocent comment than to have things overrun.
I agree with you in principle, but even as someone who regularly gets downvoted trying to make jokes, I understand the derision towards humor here. The problem is people just aren't as funny as they think they are, and at the same time jokes often derail the conversation.
While HN isn't perfect, I think overall it's extremely well moderated. Although I have to admit (and I have other accounts which are much older, so I'm not new here), it does seem to be slowly slipping in the wrong direction as it becomes more popular.
Personally I'd be fine if the humor and the condescending, egotistic, patronizing comments all went away.
I don't think humor in general is a bad thing (my friends would likely in part describe me as a wise-cracking, sarcastic jokester at times), but I just don't think HN -- or any sort of textual medium where participants don't know each other that well or at all -- is a great place for it.
Obviously we're all free to disagree on this (and we obviously are, given the size of this subthread), but I think overall the community agrees (through up/downvoting) that humor on HN should be fairly rare.
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.
From my past experience on HN, humor is not well received. I've been scolded numerous times for cracking a joke or two. Personally, I appreciate humor on HN, but I can understand how people don't want HN comments to turn into redit comment threads.
As I have said before in response to similar comments: HN has no problem with humour. Where it differs from, say, typical reddits is that in order to get upvoted rather than dowvoted, humorous comments have to actually be funny.
HN may seem a little dull to you at times, but there's a lot of people here that would prefer that the humor be restricted such that your posts would still be worth reading if you stripped out the humor.
It's not that HN is anti humour. It's that by upvoting jokes and the like, you encourage everyone to toss in their oh-so-clever jokes and the level of discussion runs even further downhill. Reddit's there if you want that; HN _tries_ at least to avoid some of the bottom-level commenting.
Kind of remarkable that when I first read this comment thread, this was the top-rated comment, but while I was posting a short agreement with someone in this reply thread who noted that HN has a collective problem with snark and satire, pgcj_poster's comment was downvoted by people who apparently have a problem with snark and satire.
I would put "/s" here, but when I say there are HN readers who really need to lighten the hell up sometimes, I am not remotely being sarcastic.
Yeah. Humor on HN is a difficult thing. For the most part, I don't bother. There seems to be a different standard for top-level comments than for replies.
HN doesn't hate humour, there are cases of humour not merely tolerated, but significantly up-voted.
But most of the things people try to pass off as humour are simply just not funny to a large enough proportion that they get down-voted and flagged. Most of the "funny comments" are tired, derivative, old, or predictable riffs on things we've seen far too often. Some of us have been around a long time, and when we see things like this we just sigh. It's tedious.
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