The political subreddits get political, yes. And hot-topic ones.

But the subreddits for your favorite band or hobby are alive and healthy.

HN’s culture might be “preserved” but it’s not perfect. Personally, it irks me how humorless this place is. Jokes are often not allowed here.

Jokes not being welcomed is one of the reasons I love this site.

When jokes are fully accepted they tend to be lower effort than a comment that is thoughtful, and in reddit they tend to get more upvotes than the thoughtful one. This incentives people to write low effort jokes in order to get more fake points. The tendency thus created alienates rational discussion and doesn't bring much information.

There are already places in where you can be witty instead of wise, but this is not one of them.

This is it - if you want humour, there are already a million places where you can get that. Reddit’s already a thing; go to the relevant subreddits there.

But if you want serious and mostly respectful discussions (people losing their cool and attacking others also gets downvoted quite harshly), you’ve got HN. You can criticise it; it definitely sometimes is just smugness or low-effort cynicism. It’s not perfect, but it sure as heck is one of the best communities I’ve ever seen.

If this place became like Reddit, it’d lose its whole raison d'être.

What irks me is when humor is automatically equated with low effort. Sometimes, a joke is the perfect comment on a thread, but heaven forbid we crack a smile.

Jokes within thoughtful comments have no problem to get upvoted here. Don't mistake "apparent humorless" for "completely dry", as many highly upvoted comments do contain humor, but it's more subtle and within a comment that is insightful even without the joke, not just a comment containing a joke without anything else.

On Reddit there is a lot of jokes, but most of them are replicas or just pure memes that gets repeated ad infinitum, nothing that really cracks me up except some rare ones. But on HN, when there is a highly upvoted comment with a joke somewhere within, it's always good one that contributes to the comments otherwise insightful points.

The problem is not humor on online forums being "low effort", it's "low SNR".

The problem is when everyone thinks that they have some unique insight and that their cynical one-liners are worthy to be written down. Put that together with the development of "in-groups", and you'd see most of the threads becoming sequences of re-hashed jokes. You get "ha-ha funny" posts, but you get no one really challenging anything related to the topic and you drown out those that might actually have something to add to the conversation.

Good comedy/satire works when it manages to bring new insight into a topic. If you have such talent and your comment can be insightful and humorous, I doubt you'd have trouble with the crowd.

You would have a point if people tended to be wise here, but HN just trades humor for smugness and cynicism. Instead of the top comment being a joke it tends to be a middlebrow dismissal from someone who never bothered to read the article past the headline. The lack of humor doesn't make the comments here more information dense, it just moves the entropy elsewhere and makes it a bit more insufferable.

Great point, and I agree that it sucks that low-effort "serious" comments are more tolerated than humorous ones. But I also think disallowing jokes has a "chilling effect" that ultimately encourages a greater number of people to either think before they post or not post at all. It's not perfect, and of course I'd prefer if low-effort comments vanished regardless of their tone, but it's waaay easier to get away (or even become a celebrity) with extremely low-effort comments on Reddit, low brow or not.

You are not wrong, but the solution to this problem is by discouraging smug and cynical comments, not by just giving up and letting HN become reddit.

I disagree. This place takes itself too seriously sometimes, and needs a little humour to lighten things up.

It's often said that HN is a humorless place, but it may depend on the kind of humor. You have to know your audience.

Some of my highest-voted comments have been pure humor or satire. Here's an example (my two comments in the thread; start at the top for context):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690893

Heh, yeah, my top comments are also humor. Thing is, I put a ton of effort into crafting a good laugher, and then once in a while it gets kicked and that just makes me sad.

I think so and I'm so grateful. The overall attitude in tech has definitely changed though.

Still, HK is one of the only forum type of sites I visit anymore.

I gave up on Reddit. Most forums are long dead. I don't have time to keep up on some discord channel. Don't use Facebook.

So I'm grateful for HN.

Reddit is trying to be everything to everyone. HN has a very specific group of people in mind.

Redditors have always been political, in fact it was such a big problem r/politics was one of the first subreddits. I think it’s great Reddit captures everything from far left to alt right while in r/skiing I don’t really ever see politics.

Reddit is different (I'm not sure it was ever good), but by design from its origin and for the bulk of its life it was normie 4chan. It was aggressively offensive everywhere. Where it was political, it was way more aggressive than it is now, because it was barely moderated or moderated by psychopaths and perverts.

I don't get all of this Golden Age talk. I thought it was less boring when half of it was /b/, but the idea that it was apolitical is weird.

In 2010 every women in SF had "no redditors" on their dating profiles. I'm still not sure why this happened, but I think a friend of a friend of a friend told them it was a website for pedophiles.

reddit was also the first true large scale gathering place for incels, men's rights activists, and pick-up artists.

Most of these subcultures have been banned today but reddit acted as a massive force multiplier for these movements.

It's still a gathering place for men with these attitudes. Reddit in general is a boy's club where women are considered second class, and there are no women-only spaces, but plenty where men dominate.

For example, the 'lesbians' subreddit is full of pornography, and the 'actuallesbians' subreddit is full of men pretending to be women. Any attempt by women to start a subreddit exclusively for women inevitably gets banned.

This has been a "culture" on the internet for as long as I can remember, dating back to the first printed picture from a computer (or first sent image over internet?) being of a group woman and one of the standard test image (for early machine learning maybe?) was a woman in a suggestive pose (from Playboy or similar magazine if I remember correctly). The term "No one is a woman on the internet" has also been uttered for as long as I remember, although many of the early pioneers of computers were women and the space wouldn't have been the same without them.

There are women-only spaces on Reddit (or at least they claim to be, impossible to verify obviously) just like there are male-only spaces on Reddit (and both goes for the internet in general), you just need to know where to look.

> Any attempt by women to start a subreddit exclusively for women inevitably gets banned.

I would love to see where this has happened, as I haven't seen it before. I don't find it hard to believe, but want to see it happening in practice before jumping to any conclusions.

Edit: To add another example from this very submission, which is a common way of framing things (on the internet):

> Alright boys, I think I have figured out where the timeline went wrong [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30232117

> I would love to see where this has happened, as I haven't seen it before. I don't find it hard to believe, but want to see it happening in practice before jumping to any conclusions.

This doesn't prove that it'll happen to _every_ women-only subreddit, but I think the previous poster is alluding to the ban on several radical feminism subreddits. I'm sure more detail can be found on their new home, which rhymes with "we are over it".

> one of the standard test image (for early machine learning maybe?) was a woman in a suggestive pose (from Playboy or similar magazine if I remember correctly)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

That's the one! Original (uncropped) version: NSFW obviously - https://womenlovetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/distres...

Here is a nice SFW article about Lena (Lenna) today:

https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of...

A brief report from a 1997 IS&T conference where Lena was a special guest (also SFW except for one link that has a warning next to it):

http://www.lenna.org/lenna_visit.html

An article from The Pudding about Lena's wish for her Playboy image to stop being used:

https://pudding.cool/2021/10/lenna/

And her Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_Forsén

> I would love to see where this has happened, as I haven't seen it before. I don't find it hard to believe, but want to see it happening in practice before jumping to any conclusions.

By "exclusively for women" he means "excludes trans women".

Well, yes. Because they're actually men. So you end up with absurdities like the 'actual lesbians' subreddit being full of (and moderated by) fetishistic dudes talking about their "girl dicks" and other such nonsense.