Ask HN: Why no sense of humor?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575002

by quellhorst • 17 years ago

64 63 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Is it just me or is any humor on hacker news down voted right away?

quoderat• 17 years ago

I've wondered about that as well -- and it is strange to me. Hackers are widely-known for their impish pranks. And even when humor is used in the service of a point, that comment is usually voted down.

I know we don't want the place to turn into Reddit or, worse, Digg, but a little humor actually improves my thought processes and analytical skills.

But every community has its culture. HN is no exception.

To further explore it, in my experience of 15 years in the tech industry or its outskirts, I think a small but vocal minority of tech types are humor-impaired, and that often has an over-large impact on any tech-oriented site.

But who knows? I'm just spouting off ideas.

rms• 17 years ago

There's a much higher standard here for humor than other sites. Things that are really, truly funny, especially while also being sublimely clever are often modded higher than all surrounding comments.

tel• 17 years ago

Another thing that differentiates humor on HN from humor elsewhere is that disrespectful commentary, no matter the level of wit, is rejected.

frossie• 17 years ago

As a recent arrival who has been trying to figure out what the community standard is, I have been paying close attention to this question. In line with rms's comment, no, I don't think humour gets downvoted per se. Cheap shots definitely are, which covers a lot of sarcasm, as are quips with no additional content and general rudeness. What I would say is that comments which lack content get punished even more when attempting (either successfully or not) to get a laugh.

I certainly don't think there is anything wrong with having a forum where every line doesn't play to the peanut gallery.

endtime• 17 years ago

I think you're on the right track. In my experience, funny is not downvoted for funny's sake. However, there's a strong correlation between funny comments and short/low quality/insubstantial comments, and the latter will get downvoted.

If you want to be funny, be interesting at the same time. If you can't, then save the joke for reddit.

niyazpk2• 17 years ago

Take the case of Reddit. Programming reddit used to be the place where smart programmers used to hang around and have quality discussions about the subject they care about the most, but the simple fact that reddit supported other kinds of news/content in the form of subreddits made the site a place for a lot of funny, worthless and snarky comments. Now people are more interested in taking sides in worthless arguments (about Joel Spolsky?) than serious productive discussions.

Remember that I am not ranting about the quality of the users of reddit, but what I am trying to say is that reddit as a community has become bloated. Of course reddit does have a lot of brilliant hackers as users, but the place is not like what it used to be. I doubt that there can be serious (programming) discussions in reddit anymore. Reddit is becoming more of a Digg than anything else.

Meanwhile Hacker News is trying very hard to prevent the same thing happeneing to them. It is a low-traffic news site for programmers that has very high quality content and committed contributors. A few days ago the site was mentioned in some social websites (including reddit) and a lot of traffic came in, and guess what they did? Here is what Paul Graham suggested:

"We’ve had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.

You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter."

That is a very bold step to take, and worth it if you take the quality of the content seriously.

It is not that the people using programming reddit and hacker news are different. Even if the same person visited both the sites, he will be more inclined to post funny remarks in reddit while he will give serious opinions in hacker news. Not that there is something bad in being humorous, but being too much funny is kinda annoying.

Taken from http://www.diovo.com/2009/04/broken-windows-theory-online-co...

MaysonL• 17 years ago

And the spate of Erlang articles which followed pg's quoted post was one of the funniest occurrences on Hacker News, ever.

scott_s6• 17 years ago

For about ten minutes. Then it became obnoxious that it covered the front page.

andreyf2• 17 years ago

Taking a casual remark unreasonably literally is "one of the funniest occurrences on HN, ever"?

I'm having trouble finding any variation on that joke that I've found funny since the 5th grade...

tsally• 17 years ago

Agreed. And equally important is the fact that no one really talks about it. Instead of bringing up how they were around for "Erlang Day" in every comment thread, people just remember it in the back of their minds as something amusing that happened in the past.

Batsu• 17 years ago

I noticed this (though not in regards to the traffic - I only read Hacker News and not the associated blog/news) and had some itching curiosity as to why there was so much Erlang discussion going on.

I figured HN had some strange seating in the Erlang community :)

invisible• 17 years ago

I agree with that the size of HN helps with the goal of maintaining quality. I have always loved being able to visit digg/reddit and get more socially-involved content, then visiting HN and being able to get more professionally-involved content.

One thing I have noticed that could be good or bad depending on the situation, but sometimes good posts I notice in new (technically relevant, different content that is truly interesting) doesn't make it to the front page. However, every 3rd+ Tech Crunch article does.

niyazpk2• 17 years ago

Yeah. I too cannot understand why the techcrunch articles are getting to the frontpage so often. I see a lot of NYTimes too.

As of now, I am satisfied with the content in HN.

I like the ask-HN kinda stuff more.

andreyf2• 17 years ago

"You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang "

That is a very bold step to take, and worth it if you take the quality of the content seriously

Haha, a bit ironic that you mention this, considering it turned into a pretty sophomoric joke...

Confusion• 17 years ago

I doubt that there can be serious (programming) discussions in reddit anymore

There still are discussions I consider worth my time to read, for example: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8dsxr/is_there_...

lucumo• 17 years ago

Let's be fair. It's not just that reddit has a million jokes, it's that all these jokes are a rehash of jokes before it.

Posting a million lines of text and then ending it with Bell-Air was funny. The first time. Same for masking a link to some site you don't expect to go. It was funny the first time they did it. Some ten years before they reused the joke for Goatse, and then for tubgirl, and then for 2g1c, and then for a Rick Roll. Kind of gets boring...

I'm sorry, but I find the whole meme-thing rather annoying. Not only does it get in the way of serious discussion, it even gets in the way of new jokes.

I don't mind seeing a joke on HN, but only if it's funny. I'd rather risk no humor on any site than stupid humor.

unalone2• 17 years ago

Humor is anathema to good discussion on sites that use voting models and karma.

It would be a lot different if discussions were flat, or at least where comments weren't judged on a per-comment basis. The problem is that the most humor a voting site allows, the more the top answers get diluted. I was a hardcore Reddit user when it started going downhill; the shift happened after one or two puns/jokes were breakthrough huge successes. After that, everybody tried to get the same success.

I downvote comments that are humorous but don't add to the discussion. I also usually don't upvote useful comments that are humorous. This community is valuable because when somebody posts they're rarely being sarcastic/ironic. You get a lot of people saying things they mean at face value. Humor's downside is that it adds uncertainty to conversations.

knightinblue3• 17 years ago

Humor is great, except for when it gets upvoted more than actually constructive comments.

For that, I go to reddit. When I feel even more impish, I hit digg.

Basically, there's a place for humor and there's a place for constructive dialogue. You'd think the two would go hand in hand, but a voting system like HN proves that it's a tough thing to do.

unalone2• 17 years ago

Basically, there's a place for humor and there's a place for constructive dialogue. You'd think the two would go hand in hand, but a voting system like HN proves that it's a tough thing to do.

Here's how it works. Give people a soapbox, a place for them to develop their own writing styles and personalities, and humor and pathos tend to develop. I see it in every blog that I read and like: every voice is different and unique because they're able to experiment and develop themselves, and then they get an audience.

On Hacker News, users are depersonalized. That is to say, Hacker News is about the community as a whole rather than as unalone or knightinblue. Our contributions are valued, but only as long as we're being a part of the community. Say you're having problems with an ex-wife. Say I've been learning how to play basketball. These things may be a big part of our lives, but they don't have a place in Hacker News. So we leave a part of ourselves at the door when we post here. In reward, we have a community that has thus far managed not to turn petty and immature, where you can discuss things with a lot of people without there being memorable characters and personalities distracting from the conversation.

In fact, the people whose names I do know tend to be ones I wish I didn't know. Certain people stand out to be because they do use HN in a way outside the norm. Some people I remember for being over-the-top sarcastic and scathing. Some people use Hacker News like a soapbox, an attention-getter space. I'm sure that in some ways, my own habit of writing lengthy posts stands out and irritates some people, because I'll often go into more detail than seems warranted with an initial post.

So the emphasis in what you said is dialogue. When an individual is speaking, personality becomes a big thing. But in a productive conversation, personality becomes a deterrent that distracts from the important details.

phil_collins• 17 years ago

Because nobody here has one.

buugs• 17 years ago

This probably wouldn't be downmodded so much if people were less defensive when they were reading comments.

knightinblue3• 17 years ago

Agreed. I see no reason to downvote that comment so strongly. People really need to lighten up.

patio11• 17 years ago

I enjoy humor. I do not enjoy the 157th regurgitation of a joke, which is meant not to be funny but to remind me of the experience of that joke once being funny, particularly when that wastes space from my dedicated business/programming bandwidth. See: absolutely any reference to Monty Python, lolcats, the bastardized pieces of proto-humor commonly sometimes described as "memes", etc.

High voted jokes also breed more of themselves. (As do highly voted comments, on, e.g., sexually gratifying oneself. Oddly enough, people often think the creeping pornification is a substitute for humor, too. We're pretty harsh on those too, thank goodness.)

kyro• 17 years ago

Are you kidding? Many of the comments I've made have been marginally witty, and shot me up into karma stardom.

christofd3• 17 years ago

I gotta say... the mindset of many on here seems to be: quickly find a flaw that I can knock down. People on here are usually confrontational in their approach, e.g. humor gets attacked. The tone on here seems to be rather grumpy (but I'm more used to the academic world). I don't like fluff-talk, but I also dislike easy criticism and literal-mindedness. However, HN is currently the only game in town.

gambling8nt4• 17 years ago

It may seem that way, but that has more to do with the fact that agreement is not inherently comment worthy, since it does not do anything to further the discussion (note that expansion of an existing argument is comment worthy, but significantly rarer). Instead, the first responses to something have to show disagreement in order to establish an alternative viewpoint, through which there can be discussion.

christofd3• 17 years ago

Exactly: expansion of an existing argument is comment-worthy, but significantly rarer.

I'm missing a coherent discussion, instead I'm often stuck in a game of block & attack. One young hacker wants to show the other young hacker that he is superior. Personally, I find this is just noise... I seek comprehension.

adrianwaj3• 17 years ago

You are spot on, there's little humour and Slashdot is way funnier.

I always upvote something that is funny: maybe here funny isn't smart, which is wrong, or, funny is smart, which can easily be the case, but smart people who aren't funny don't want to acknowledge that others are funny.

Maybe "humour" is upvoted but "funny" is not because it's weird and uncommunal. So humour is often not appreciated because it gets too easily percieved as funny amongst the ultra-seriousness.

Maybe being in serious concentration, which gains the upvotes, people forget about their funny side in both reading and writing.

scott_s6• 17 years ago

Slashdot is filled with people trying to be funny. To the point that it dominates a thread, and drowns out real discussion. I hope we can avoid that here.

adrianwaj3• 17 years ago

Right, but there are some seriously funny comments.

njharman2• 17 years ago

Hacker News is for entrepreneurs making money. It is serious business, not a place for fun.

scott_s6• 17 years ago

People are rarely as funny as they think they are.

njharman2• 17 years ago

It was at +5 before linking to it here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=564827

That is an example of humor that didn't get nuked to hell.

It's also, I humbly put forth, an example of making an counter argument, making a separate point and not being mind-numbingly boring about it.

HN, humor is not death. You can laugh a little and still have time to believe you're smarter and better than the rest of us.

gambling8nt4• 17 years ago

Humor is not automatically downvoted. One-liners that add nothing to a discussion are.

Humor can be used to great effect in order to make a point--but, more often than not, it represents much less of an increase in signal and much more of an increase in noise.

wooster2• 17 years ago

Oh yeah? Your mom.

wooster2• 17 years ago

Yup, you were right, no sense of humor.

Aron• 17 years ago

If you find something that can fly and it has feathers, while everything else that can't fly does not have feathers, then you should give feathers slightly more plausibility as the causal reason for flight.

donaq• 17 years ago

Personally, where humorous posts are concerned, I upvote those that also have content (regardless of whether it is actually funny), leave alone those that are funny without content, and downvote those that do not have content and aren't funny. Sometimes, though rarely, I also upvote posts not relevant to the topic but which I find hilariously funny/clever, because a good joke is a hack all by itself.

davidw• 17 years ago

That's a tricky one isn't it? I think the same things that make for smart and creative give one a good sense of humor, but you have to actively self-censor yourself to make sure you're really limiting yourself to things you really find funny and not just 'hah hah'. Of course, tastes differ too.

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

The long answer involves a lot of talk about how it degrades the site.

The short answer is that since people, last I checked, were animals who joked, and computers were made for people, not the other way around, the site should support joking and flag/hide jokes appropriately depending on user preferences.

I'm okay with it either way. I don't think of the humorless nature of HN as being some huge asset. In fact, it makes the place stuffy and overly earnest. Dare I say artificially boring. But I understand the reasoning behind the community's standards. I just think like everything else there is a proper mix in life. Finding the right mix for a social site seems to be a critical factor.

By the way, humor doesn't completely go away. People still sneak it in here or there. You're just forced to follow it with something of value to the conversation. This eliminates the hit-and-run snarky one-liners found on so many other sites.

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

"The most important thing is that the comments are kept useful by constant vigilance on the part of the community. Did anyone see the reddit t-shirt thread yesterday? That sort of thing needs to remain unthinkable here. Not just the sophomoric sexualization and laughter-excuses-any-misconduct, but the parts of Internet culture which aren't relevant to programming/business/etc. (I like lolcats, anime, and politics myself -- just not here.)" - Patio11, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555595

edw519• 17 years ago

You asked for it...

A salesman, a project manager, and a programmer are kidnapped by terrorists on the way to a customer demo. The company refuses to pay ransom so they are to be executed. The kidnappers grant each a last request.

The salesman said, "I have been working very hard on a Power Point presentation of our new release and I haven't had a chance to present it yet. It's only 143 slides and 2 hours long, and I'd like to present it before I'm killed."

The project manager said, "I have developed a new methodology for implementing our new release. I'd like to present 25 flip chart pages to describe it. I will only take one hour."

The programmer said, "Kill me first."

jimfl• 17 years ago

I have noticed this as well, and not just the time I got downmodded for responding "XSLT" on a thread asking what folks thought were the most "tranformational" programming languages.

pg• 17 years ago

Most, but not all. Most attempts at humor in online forums are lame, so this is what you'd expect to find on a forum where lame comments were frowned upon.

I'm not saying voters' judgement of what's funny is perfect, but it's not too far off. I occasionally see a comment that seems funny that got voted down, but these are greatly outnumbered by ones that weren't that funny.

rodrigo• 17 years ago

Well, it mostly is; But the humor that gets upvoted its VERY funny, so, im ok with that high threshold. I keep coming here because of the signal/noise ratio wich has not changed that much in my more than 562 days here, wich in internet time its a lot of time. So, this is a truly valuable place.

Ask HN: Why no sense of humor?

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