If you're coming from Reddit, Imgur or YouTube it seems like hate, but I've found it's simply a lack of humor...

Any jokes, memes or puns are frowned upon the community 99% of the time. I suppose it's considered redundant or not-constructive...

That's only because 99% of jokes aren't as good as people thought they were when they pushed the submit button.

HN has a great sense of humor. I know this of course because my jokes have been upvoted.

Most jokes I see are downvoted and I can't recall seeing a single joke comment. That's not to say there zero humor here, just much much less than other less serious discussion forums.

That is true, but it not just the lack the humor, it is the pretentiousness and the faux-politeness.

Well being nice and polite is part of the guidelines here, which is not such a bad thing.

But the pretentiousness annoys me sometimes, at the end of the day it's another forum of people who don't think they're part of a hive-mind... which we definitely are

Being nice is great, being fake-nice is not, sometimes politeness is a facade to hide passive-aggressiveness and up-you-up-manship.

HN readership is as establishment and conventional as it goes, it is the "study hard for the SAT/GRE/GMAT" crowd.

It's an elitist mirror to 4chan's edgelord culture in many ways.

if only, for all their sins (which are lots) 4chan is a very fascinating place. The other day I was fantasizing (lol) about giving a talk to out-of-touch academics/journalist boomers and explaining them the 4chan phenomenon.

There are lot of very smart people there. You compare the recommendations in music/books/cinema between them and reddit and it is "People" vs "Cahiers du Cinema".They tend to create lots of Internet culture, the humor is caustic but it can touch genius from time to time and they are very open regarding topics like sexuality,depression, economics and so on.It is proof there is always more that meet the eye.

>You compare the recommendations in music/books/cinema between them and reddit and it is "People" vs "Cahiers du Cinema".

My point is there are affectations in both communities (4chan and HN) that are strange opposites of one another. Here, people often pretend to be more polite and erudite than they are, there, people often act more rudely than they normally would, because that's the culture, that's the mask you're expected to wear.

And on both sides there's a pretension which you're kind of displaying. You're talking about a site as vast and varied as Reddit as a whole as if it were a single forum, and dismissing it as qualitatively lesser than an anonymous imageboard that has shitposting as a central part of its identity. Find some well moderated subreddits for any particular genre and you'll find quality of conversation equal to anything on 4chan, or even HN.

Also, you know, 4chan has been around long enough at this point that a lot of "out of touch academics" and "journalist boomers" have probably been there.

On the contrary, that is the refreshing part of 4chan, the unpretentiousness, a guy can talk about Nietzsche using memes and somehow make a good argument. Reddit is pretentious without any reason for it to be, at least here in HN there are competent people. And I was comparing the lists of recommended books of r/books vs its equivalent in 4 chan, as far as an apple vs apple comparison goes.

I'm not sure if the stuff I see in HN threads qualify as hard feelings. They are more like jabs, prods, cheap shots, demands, begs and lots of bikeshedding with a smither of useful information here and there. I do appreciate the fact that they try to discourage the reddit style of rimshotting.