Re:It's not just you – no one is posting on social media any...
by dredmorbius on Friday September 01, 2023 @03:29PM
(#37355194)
On HN jokes are possible, but they've got to be quite good, and are typically best included as seasoning to a comment rather than as freestanding comments of their own. I've done this myself, notably in my Pompeii comment of a few years ago, which was well-received (better than most of my efforts):
Personally, when I read Reddit, I'm in awe of how good the best jokes are. The problem is that you can't have everything; with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor. HN's tradeoff is to optimize for signal-noise ratio, so that stuff gets hammered particularly hard.
People complain about HN's humorlessness, and they're right to a point. The trouble is that with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor, and HN wants to optimize for signal/noise ratio. It's not that we're killjoys—we like jokes and laughing—it's that the signal/noise problem is hard.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133112>
Dang's written on this many times, typical:
Personally, when I read Reddit, I'm in awe of how good the best jokes are. The problem is that you can't have everything; with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor. HN's tradeoff is to optimize for signal-noise ratio, so that stuff gets hammered particularly hard.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7696013>
People complain about HN's humorlessness, and they're right to a point. The trouble is that with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor, and HN wants to optimize for signal/noise ratio. It's not that we're killjoys—we like jokes and laughing—it's that the signal/noise problem is hard.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7503356>
He's specifically pointed to a take of scott_s from 2009 several times:
people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289>