Humour is proven to help you think more flexibly and creatively. Encouraging people to have a sense of humour and rewarding that frees their minds to think of more productive things, which in turn may create better quality content. A lot of workplaces use regular "games" to relieve tension, relax and change the "thinking mode" into something more playful. I completely agree with HN's stance on abuse, harassment, hate speech and negativity and am puzzled by its intolerance of oneliners and seeming lack of humour as a motif across even a small number of submissions. Given this, it's fair to ask, Why so serious, HN?
Fundamentally it is to have a good signal to noise ratio, in the name of efficiency.<p>I'd rather read/parse quickly 50 insightful comments, that 300 where most of them are jokes, puns, etc.<p>Sure more jokes would likely give a more friendly or relaxed atmosphere, but there are already so many of these informative not-too-serious-but-fun-to-read communities, that I am grateful to have at least one place where I know the comment quality and information density is quite high.
I disagree that HN doesn't like humor. Compare the comments of this article posted yesterday on HN vs. Reddit (the one where the guy teaches his daughter CSS and has to vertically align something).<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9993171" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9993171</a><p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/3fkkh0/teaching_css_hilarious_short_blog_post/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/3fkkh0/teaching_css_...</a><p>It's not like the HN crowd is completely stiff. But look at the ridiculous difference in post quality. Reddit is almost 100% one-liners with no substance whereas Hacker News managed to find some interesting things to discuss.<p>In simple upvote/downvote systems, content will always proceed towards the lowest common denominator. The moment it becomes culturally acceptable to post something low effort and obvious is the moment a high quality community dies.
The 950+ results returned from searching HN for the term [0] would suggest that, contrary to your thesis, Hacker News readers do, in fact, appreciate one liners quite a bit -- just take a look at these examples:<p>- <i>Also, awk has a fun way of parsing input, which makes for very enjoyable one liners</i> [1]<p>- <i>In Vim, configuration is a bunch of one-liners and I love that.</i> [2]<p>(As for your other point, however, i.e. whether HN readers appreciate humorous comments, sadly, I'm not sure how we could go about determining that...)<p>[0] <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+"one+liners"" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8894231" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8894231</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7303266" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7303266</a>
They get tiresome very quickly. I recently sat and read a Reddit/r/History discussion on Pirate-ship Democracies, the continual (and all very similar) puns & jokes about pirates littered between the interesting points got really, really annoying very fast.<p>In person, if you're having a discussion and someone cracks a good pun it's fine, but when you're on the internet 100+ people make the same pun, then it's really not fine, it's boring.
<i>A lot of workplaces use regular "games"</i><p>Spolosky talks about this quite a bit in the StackOverflow/StackExchange podcasts in relation to online communities. The podcasts have been recorded from the beginning as StackOverflow was built.<p>The problem with regular jokes in online communities:<p>+ They separate the insiders from the outsiders<p>+ They become a focus of online activity for regular users in lieu of the public organizing principle.<p>StackOverflow is useful for solving problems precisely because meme-making and joke cracking is not allowed to be anyone's <i>primary</i> activity. The same holds true on HN, nobody is popular just because they are funny. It's not that HN doesn't like humor so much as it favors cleverness, knowledge, and insight; and most attempts at humor lack all three.<p>If it takes Seinfeld years to get a joke pitch perfect, what are the average HN'ers odds of doing so in 74 keystrokes? I find that the delete link is really useful whenever I succumb to the urge.<p>Good luck.
HN likes <i>good</i> one liners. Where good is defined as being so funny or insightful that you can't not laugh. A pretty high bar to meet, but it keeps the noise down. There have been a number of great one liners over the years.
I appreciate the no-humour approach in HN greatly. Almost every other forum is full of people trying to be funny. This basically infects the culture of the forum, and crowds out most other kinds of conversation.<p>I find the types of jokes people are likely to make about technology, or about interesting/engaging articles, very tedious. I also think a lot of the jokes are simply cynical.<p>I would much rather read comments that are earnest, than comments that were flippant.