By the way, we're going to penalize April Fools' jokes tomorrow so that they fall off the front page quickly. This isn't new, but we're going to be more systematic about it. The April 1 tech thing has become stale. If you guys see April Fools stories that we miss, flag them unless they're really particularly good.
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. HN wants to optimize for intellectual curiosity, which wants higher signal/noise ratio. It's not that we're killjoys—we like jokes and laughing—it's that the signal/noise problem is hard.
Comments
By the way, we're going to penalize April Fools' jokes tomorrow so that they fall off the front page quickly. This isn't new, but we're going to be more systematic about it. The April 1 tech thing has become stale. If you guys see April Fools stories that we miss, flag them unless they're really particularly good.
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. HN wants to optimize for intellectual curiosity, which wants higher signal/noise ratio. It's not that we're killjoys—we like jokes and laughing—it's that the signal/noise problem is hard.