Reddit? It has always been like that! People try to crack jokes to get attention, now attention has a little number next to it (the upvotes/downvotes) but it's the same thing that's always happened ever. Think back in high school there was always a few kids who would ALWAYS crack jokes to be the center of attention, it isn't any different now that we have websites that kind of "promote" this content more than the rest.

Sure it happens elsewhere as well. But Reddit is really amplifying it.

Did you even read the article? Unless you think Reddit is causing severe brain damage, the phenomenon it's discussing is completely unrelated to this (and if it is causing the brain damage described it's hard to understand why anyone would upvote the jokes, since the other part of it is ruining your ability to laugh at other people's jokes).

>Unless you think Reddit is causing severe brain damage

It probably does.

Probably not the very specific kind discussed in the article.

This is why they introduced the [serious] tag, which literally prohibits jokes in the thread. This was a very welcome feature.

Welcome to whom? I'd rather have the wisecracks.

Welcome to the people who want to participate in serious discussions. You still have threads, and whole subreddits for that matter, with jokes. But before this tag, people who wanted a joke-free discussion were unable to do so on Reddit, and had to dig through piles of puns and jokes to get some thoughtful comments. Now we have space for both groups.

Yeah, but I feel that the combination of jokes and serious discussion is better than either one alone.

They could also add a [srsly!?!] tag for when all comments must express outrage

Actually it would make more sense to have tags and filters, so you could prioritize the type of comments you want to see.

I'm too young to have known it but I think slashdot had a system like that?

It still has.

It's only missing the comments for one to filter nowadays.

I totally agree. One of the reasons I like HN: high signal to noise ratio.

HN is also mostly crap

When you're first getting started in tech I think HN seems much more serious than it is.

Once you're a bit more experienced you realize it's a bunch of hipsters talking about simple and insignificant technologies, and completely ignoring everything else as "old".

That being said, I think it's highly entertaining.

> hipsters talking about simple and insignificant technologies

Are you telling me that a new CSS framework that will save you two lines in your CSS files is insignificant? Or a new <insert the current language that is hip>-style language in <insert a number between 1 and 100> lines of JS!

Surely these are the greatest inventions of our time.

Right. Meanwhile forward-looking tech like gaze detection, word vectors, LPWAN, FPGAs, and so on, are lucky to get a couple posts a month.

I have been active in high tech for many moons and like to look at this place as just another alternative feed for a old man ;) I would much rather HN than other sources, but my time is limited like many. So I just hop on occassionally and learn (or teach) something new. Once in a while a post resonates with me, but when it doesn't that doesn't mean it's just noise. It can mean I have much to learn.

Why don't you post some?

Ain't nobody got time for that.

Since you have time to make this place worse by posting snarky comments about how beneath you it is, you should also have time to make it better.

> HN: high signal to noise ratio

The signal on HN has started to decline tho. Things used to be better. It's kind of inevitable for online communities tho.

I haven't been on for that long, but I am starting to see examples of what you mean. I tend to weed out what doesn't apply to me which I think many do.