If this is not a satirical comment, can I ask you to justify this position? What is disturbed by having a bit of humor alongside our intellectual curiosity? I could have missed it, but don't see anything discouraging humor (referential or otherwise) in the HN guidelines[1] or FAQ[2] with regard to commentary.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

The keyword is "alongside intellectual curiosity". If you can make a point in a funny manner, do it. But if just making jokes becomes accepted, jokes drown out everything else, simply because they are infinite. Like all those gaming subreddits that consist 99% of "funny thing that just happened" or "this reference to a thing that occurs in the game, which you can recognize as occurring in the game to confirm that you have, indeed, played that game". You can call that socializing but to me it's just turning everything into everything/nothing forums. If HN becomes soft on that, we need a new HN.

Nothing wrong with humor, but on a completely personal level, it does frustrate me when the top comment is entirely superficial, since it adds nothing to the conversation. And subjectively, it feels like there's been an uptick in joke / meme / information-free comments and their ranking in the wake of recent Twitter and Reddit turmoil.

But hey, I've been here for 15 years, and forum cultures change over time. I wouldn't overindex on my feelings.

What's ironic is the tangential threads complaining about humor on HN throw far more noise and entropy into these threads than the jokes themselves. People could have just ignored it, or downvoted it and moved on, but no, someone made a joke and now we need to stop the car and have discourse about how HN is turning into Reddit. Knuckles must be rapped. Fingers wagged and pearls clutched. Again.

It disturbs people's autism apparently.

Yes, and it's getting worse.

Every website has become reddit since the recent reddit controversies. Hell, even 4chan is flooded by reddit style comments...

I'm rooting for the fediverse, hopefully it (and youtube) can contain the effect.

I'm about to lower/stop my lemmy usage due to it slowly becoming reddit 2.0. Down to HN and rss feeds.

> and youtube

Yea, because YouTube comments are famously bastion of intelligent, relevant discussion.

> and youtube

Yea, because YouTube comments are famously a bastion of intelligent, relevant discussion.

Last paragraph in HN guidelines:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

The rule stating it is an illusion doesn't make it untrue.

There’s a 16+ comment discussion on whether or not an innocent, on-topic and factually correct comment is appropriate. HN is not becoming Reddit, it’s becoming more HN than ever.

Personally I think it’s a little suspicious that there are HN users who appear to be attempting to discredit or silence comments praising the efficacy of a proven anti-vampire technology.

:)

You’re a good sport :)

> It's a semi-noob illusion

The evidence provided for this is example comments from 10+ years ago complaining that HN was becoming Reddit way back then.

However, Reddit 10+ years ago was very different from Reddit today. It is arguably(?) much worse today.

HN may be turning into Reddit continuously, it's just that Reddit keeps moving the goal posts.

Eternal February instead of Eternal September

Hey! Here that’s called ‘enshittening’

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (I thought I'd keep the t word out of it to make the search URL sound different)

As if HN is some sort of intellectual silver snowflake and apparently better than Reddit. It's actually not. But I guess it's not worse either. Isn't that nice?

Define 'better'.

The average HN discussion is more substantive and on-topic than the average reddit thread, especially a default one.

No, it’s not.

As for on-topic - HN starts talking about Kotlin and Swift and pretty soon it’s discussing relatively theory and Madam Curie and what not on the same thread. And no, that’s not better and that’s not on-topic unless HN tries to define its own “on-topic” and it’s own “better” and then applies it to Reddit.

> Define 'better'

No, I won’t. Because yours would ne different from mine.

1) You're making a category error; comparing HN to Reddit makes as much sense as comparing a scalar to a vector.

2) People have been saying this since approximately day one of HN; it's this site's equivalent to social decay / "kids these days", which is a sentiment that dates back to antiquity.

No humor allowed, let's instead talk about how to use Rust (the language) to prevent the newly interred to rise again.

I’d rather read a joke than a debate about whether jokes are acceptable.