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.
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.
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.
The internet genres that go for clever but shallow wit and/or maximum emotional rev-up don't work well here. They evoke pleasures like surprise, recognition, and indignation (also a pleasure of a kind), but they do so by activating reflexes that operate much faster than the intellectual curiosity that HN tries to nurture. Curiosity needs material which is more reflective and longer-lasting. As PG wrote somewhere, the thought processes are quieter and slower. Snap reactions thwart them. Worse, they tend to keep going and often end up dominating discussion.
It's not that those internet genres suck—they're delightfully clever. But their influence takes HN away from its core. Such high-frequency, low-amplitude stuff drowns out everything else if allowed to, so we don't have the luxury of allowing everything equally. For HN to thrive, we have to clear a space for more substantive material. That's hard to do, but one fairly easy win is to rule out sites that play the other game. In our more fragile ecosystem, they count as invasive species.
theoatmeal.com and others have passionate fans who will disagree. But the fact that one likes something is separate from where it belongs. I like ice cream, but not on meat and vegetables.
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.
Because HN is not Reddit. The value of HN comes from good and insightful comments. Humor is noise and noise drowns the signal. EDIT: Humor is a problem per se if it accompanies useful comments.
Just a heads up: The HN community tends to dislike jokes, especially jokes meant to do nothing more than make another laugh. In fact, I have found the HN community weighted towards discouraging humor even when it is used not only in a one-note joke, but also as an effort to further a discussion (as good satire should).
This naturally seems to stem from their conscious efforts to promote a 'serious'/on-topic culture and humor's nature as being subjective and often hard to detect.
HN tends to discourage silly comments. It's a preference. Jokey comments tend to get the most upvotes and that tends to just become most of the discussion ... and that's not really discussion.
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.
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.
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.
I close to giving up on trying to be clever or poetic on HN, I think the implicit no jokes or fun rule means people just switch their brains off and I end up having to explain it (This particular comment not so much, but still)
HN doesn't "hate humor." It just is picky about its humor.
HN hates lazy comments.
HN hates ugly comments and a lot of humor is both lazy and ugly.
HN intentionally and consciously seeks to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. Humor tends to harm the signal-to-noise ratio, which further fuels HN pickiness about what kind of humor is acceptable here.
Humor on the internet is inherently challenging because it often relies on voice tone, body language and other cues to signal "This is a joke." On the internet, memes substitute imagery in a way that helps provide visual cues and the formatting here doesn't support communicating in that style, which makes humor even more challenging on HN.
If you are looking for light-hearted snark for some reason, HN is really not the place for that. There are plenty of places to find that and that's just not the purpose of this site.
The community here eliminates it because they don't want to be Reddit. There's lots of silly humour, in jokes and long threads on Reddit and they can be great fun if you enjoy that. HN steers towards more serious discussions and there's been a general attempt to stamp out clever quips and responses as, as fun as they are, they would change the tone of the site significantly.
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.
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.
reply