On HN jokes are possible, but they've got to be quite good, and are typically best included as seasoning to a comment rather than as freestanding comments of their own. I've done this myself, notably in my Pompeii comment of a few years ago, which was well-received (better than most of my efforts):
Personally, when I read Reddit, I'm in awe of how good the best jokes are. The problem is that you can't have everything; with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor. HN's tradeoff is to optimize for signal-noise ratio, so that stuff gets hammered particularly hard.
People complain about HN's humorlessness, and they're right to a point. The trouble is that with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor, and HN wants to optimize for signal/noise ratio. It's not that we're killjoys—we like jokes and laughing—it's that the signal/noise problem is hard.
HN isn't against humor per se. Personally, when I read Reddit, I'm in awe of how good the best jokes are. The problem is that you can't have everything; with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor. HN's tradeoff is to optimize for signal-noise ratio, so that stuff tends to get hammered.
There are other places to get lots of internet humor. HN is never going to be one of those, not because people don't like to laugh, but because the signal/noise problem is hard.
HN has never been a very good environment for jokes. One of the big goals of HN was to optimize for signal, both quality and quantity. Jokes are noise. If you want to do Reddit-style pun threads, you can go to one of the many subreddits that welcomes those. There is no shortage of places to find jokes on the Internet, but there is a severe lack of places where you can find thoughtful comments by knowledgeable people.
Paul Graham wrote in one of his essays about Hacker News:
The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. … Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny.
… Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.
Jokester comments (I leave quite a few because I enjoy being a smart-arse) are hit and miss on HN. You can't overplay the joke and you can't use memes. That rules out a lot of easy jokes, so in practice the effective humour is a bit better than the stuff you find on Reddit.
I'm a bit disappointed with all of the memes in HN comments lately. This comment (nor mine) add interesting information to the discussion. I don't mean to nitpick; jokes can be funny, but signal to noise ratio is important. Sorry for pointing out this personal sentiment if it seems inflamatory.
Humor on HN is strongly moderated in an attempt to forestall the degradation of signal/noise ratio that eventually will evolve it into a sea of memes and pun threads.
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).
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.
It may have been, and I like to laugh too. As with any optimization problem, there are tradeoffs. It's not that you're against the things that get traded away; you're for them. But you're for something else more, if you can't have both.
In HN's case, we're optimizing for signal/noise ratio. The trouble with humor on HN is not that it's bad, but that—if you have a lot of it—you also get a lot of noise. There actually is a genre of humor that does well on HN; you might call it high-signal humor. It's rare, but it exists. This comment wasn't that.
There are other places to get internet humor, like Reddit comment threads. When I read those I'm astonished at how good they are at what they do. HN is never going to be that, and we shouldn't allow an imitation of it to detract from our core.
My experience here is that humor (especially deadpan) tends to land very poorly on HN, both because people are never contextually expecting it and because they tend to downvote it when they do recognize it, as they dislike perceived low effort comments that they don't feel are meaningfully contributing to the discussion (i.e. adding noise, not signal). HN may as well put "Don't try to be funny" in the FAQ, because it almost never works out.
I'm frustrated this is getting so much pushback - puns are noise. HN is more enjoyable than reddit precisely because of the higher signal-to-noise ratio. But a significant part of the comments of this post are arguing about how much fun to have in the comments, a complete waste of my time.
Most comments that don't add substantively to the discussion seem to generate downvotes. Which is too bad, as I like the funny.
That said, it seems like it would be hard to control for only occasional (and ideally funny) jokes in a community like this -- if jokes were generally rewarded, hn could become a jokefest like Reddit, dramatically reducing the signal-to-noise ration many of us appreciate it for.
The main problem with humor on HN is that it's just too easy to find humor anywhere on the internet, but there's no other news site where you can critically discuss the news itself.
Also on Reddit it's frustrating when I'm writing something informative and it gets hidden between the memes and the jokes, so I tend to stick to jokes there.
On Reddit, the norm is often making jokes in the comments whereas here on HN ideally we're sticking to the topic at hand or posting some anecdotes related to it. Jokes just worsen the signal:noise ratio here.
Imagine reading RFC discussions but needing to skip every 3rd comment because it's just a pun.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133112>
Dang's written on this many times, typical:
Personally, when I read Reddit, I'm in awe of how good the best jokes are. The problem is that you can't have everything; with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor. HN's tradeoff is to optimize for signal-noise ratio, so that stuff gets hammered particularly hard.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696013>
People complain about HN's humorlessness, and they're right to a point. The trouble is that with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor, and HN wants to optimize for signal/noise ratio. It's not that we're killjoys—we like jokes and laughing—it's that the signal/noise problem is hard.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7503356>
He's specifically pointed to a take of scott_s from 2009 several times:
people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289>
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