
Challenge HN: Keep lame April Fools' gags off the front page - dang
(I&#x27;m going to rewrite this, because people have made some good points in the thread.)<p>Most April Fools&#x27; gags in tech are lame. Only the very best ones, such as those that show hackery ingenuity, deserve much attention on HN. I propose that we, or rather you, flag the others off the front page.<p>After plodding through them much of March 31 (where I am), I realized I was dreading the next 24 hours of having to read so many lame stories and decide which are real. Then I thought it might turn into a positive if I appealed to you all instead. This is a plea! You don&#x27;t have to do it, but in my view it will help.<p>A word about humorlessness, since it&#x27;s bound to come up. People who complain about HN&#x27;s humorlessness have a point, but not because we&#x27;re against humor. We like laughing as much as anyone. It&#x27;s because empirically, a culture of humor means a flood of lame humor, and HN&#x27;s goal is to optimize for signal&#x2F;noise ratio. As with any optimization, there are inevitably tradeoffs.
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DanielRibeiro
PS: for those deciding to flag this submission, please note that dang is HN's
moderator (as announced by pg here[1]). The HN team could physically prevent
such posts, but instead is asking the community.

[1] [http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-
hack...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news)

~~~
antihero
I think this is what bothers me. No disrespect meant to dang, but because of
their position, it is difficult to figure out whether this is a plea or a
mandate, which makes it problematic as people clearly aren't sure whether this
is up for debate, or overrides the existing method we have of keeping bad
things off of the front page in favour of moderator discretion (which I'm
aware existed anyway, but more for posts that were clearly
garbage/spam/trolls).

~~~
dang
It's a plea. But I wasn't asking for moderator discretion. Thousands of
regular users flag things. Like this post!

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tlrobinson
My threshold for tech April Fools jokes: if it's clever AND required writing
non-trivial amounts of code, it may be worthy of my attention.

I will absolutely flag anything close to "We're being acquired by
[competitor]!!1!" or "Announcing [thing totally antithetical to everything we
do]!" etc.

------
antihero
I disagree in one way, but agree in another. It's one day in 365, it provides
a little bit of relief.

But, of course, there are a lot of lame jokes. Just like there are a lot of
lame news articles that could potentially be posted on the site but are not
upvoted.

So why don't we optimise the SNR, and only upvote _good_ April Fools pranks?

I think that's a good compromise.

~~~
ozh
You've just described how HN works.

~~~
antihero
I know, right? :)

------
lifthrasiir
Sorry, I had to flag this. Today's front page was clean enough that you don't
need this post (aside from Google's Pokemon master prank). We are _already_
optimizing for signal/noise ratio, and your post is just a noise in that
regard.

~~~
dang
"Today" was hardly the bulk of April Fools' Day, and the front page was "clean
enough" because people worked hard to keep it that way.

I've been keeping a close eye on this. What swayed me was how many more April
Fools' posts were appearing on March 31 (where I am) than I previously
remember.

I do appreciate that not everyone agrees, but I want to send a message about
signal/noise ratio. That's HN's mantra. We can't have that and everything else
as well; there are tradeoffs.

The objection that this and other meta posts I've been making are also noise
is a good one, except that this is a special case while we go through a
transitional period. I won't be making them forever.

I sure wish it were true that the community is already optimizing for
signal/noise ratio, but it's not. We have a serious problem with that and
we're going to try a lot of things to fix it.

~~~
antihero
Yes, but we have up and down voting of posts, which is inherently democratic -
if we like stuff, we'll upvote it, and if it's a lame joke, we'll downvote it.
And thus SNR is maintained. Why is there a problem here? Surely what you're
kind of verging on, is telling us what we should and shouldn't enjoy?

~~~
ColinWright
Weighing in here as a random user ...

You have a valid question, and I've thought about this a lot. When you have a
very large audience it's depressingly easy to have lots and lots of quick
upvotes for something that's genuinely content-free. There are plenty of
places on the interwebs where you can find amusing material, but it feels to
me that there is a real danger of the intellectually challenging and enriching
material being swamped as we "amuse ourselves to death."

I don't think this is a case of telling people what to enjoy, it's more a case
of trying to keep the original flavor and culture. HN is certainly an unusual
corner of the 'net, and I value it.

 _Added in edit: And you can 't actually downvote posts, you can only flag
them. Unless I'm missing something, or possibly haven't hit the karma
threshold yet. Which seems unlikely._

~~~
dang
That's exactly right.

------
epaga
One thing to consider is that some of the April Fools' "jokes" are pretty
awesome hacks in disguise, such as this year's "Headdit" with actually working
head gesture recognition, etc.

So, I'd propose flagging lame pranks, but up-voting fun and inspiring hacks,
seeing as how this is Hacker News after all.

~~~
dang
I have an old Russian poster that says: "I have my own opinion, but I disagree
with it." I agree with your opinion more than mine and am going to rewrite the
post accordingly.

The truth is that I just didn't think of this way of looking at it, and it's
clearly better.

Other users (like tlrobinson) have made the same point in this thread. This
comment is for them too.

------
efficientarch
Respectfully disagree. The only ones that will be upvoted a lot will
presumably be the funny ones, not the lame ones.

~~~
dang
This is a thoughtful comment and a model of how to disagree on Hacker News.
Thank you.

I wish you were right, but I'm afraid you have an overly rosy view of upvotes.
For example,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506762)
shot to #1 in just a few minutes.

~~~
davidw
Speaking of moderation ideas, now that there is some new blood, here's another
random one. I'm not sure it's any good, and it's kind of vague, but... how
about if an article gets flagged enough, the upvoters are "named and shamed"
in some (not _highly_ visible) way. It might provide a small incentive to not
vote for lame stuff.

~~~
dang
It feels wrong to out people's votes, which are normally private. The
objections I've been making to inappropriate comments are public only because
the comments themselves are.

~~~
davidw
Fair enough. I wouldn't want my comment votes public, but I can't think of any
stories where I would mind terribly. I could see reasonable people thinking
otherwise, though.

------
Metatron
Let the system optimise for signal/noise ratio, not just a blanket 'voluntary'
ban of April Fools gags. Don't encourage people to follow your personal
opinion of 'dreading' this day, it's an abuse of your position to try to
persuade people that way. You're a moderator, please remain as objective as
possible.

The tech world is having a day of fun, people interested in tech have to make
the personal decision of whether or not they like each individual gag. If the
masses approve then it has a place on a tech news feed. If you don't like it,
feel free to make your opinion heard, just don't ask others to follow your
opinion thoughtlessly.

~~~
dang
_Let the system optimise for signal /noise ratio_

I know the system pretty well. The trouble is that, left to its own devices,
it doesn't optimize for signal/noise ratio. That's why we're appealing to the
community to do so more consciously. The current post was an experiment in
that. We're going to do a lot of such experiments until we see results.

HN isn't the whole of the tech world, nor has it ever been simply a vote
aggregator. There are other factors, the most important of which is culture.
HN's culture has been diluting, and we're going to address that.

It's true that that's opinionated. The only thing you'll get without an
opinionated moderator is drift. If HN drifts, it won't be to an interesting
place but a mediocre one.

------
xtracto
I agree completely with you. I am from a country that does not "celebrate"
April Fool's day. Today it is a really bad day for my usual internet news
pages because they are infested with lame joke attempts.

------
chippy
>April Fools' gags in tech have grown stale

Or you have gotten older.

~~~
berrypicker
What's the average age here? I feel like I'm in a no fun allowed zone.

~~~
davidw
I've had jokes upvoted here. The ingredients, as far as I can tell, were that
they were original, topical, and required a bit of thought about the subject.
In other words, the opposite of memes, or generic jokes that are probably
retellings from somewhere else. Here's one from yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7500889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7500889)

------
abalone
Just don't upvote lame ones. There's a lot of lame news everyday too. You
don't have to flag all news.

~~~
dang
Based on experience I am sure that's not enough, or I wouldn't have made the
appeal.

------
mathrawka
I think it has less to do with not having humour/fun, but more to do with
wasting our time sifting through what is real and what is not.

HN is the place where you discuss things like "Whatsapp bought for $19
BILLION". So by nature, some of the headlines we get on here are a little hard
to believe in the first place... throw in April Fools jokes, then we have
people questioning if they are reading a real PR piece, or a "joke".

~~~
antihero
I actually think that makes things interesting - when it's difficult to
discern between reality and parody, it makes you think about the world we live
in.

~~~
mathrawka
Well, why restrict it to one day a year? We should be thinking about the world
we live in more often than that.

------
Geee
Let's just collect them in one thread.

------
arbon
How about setting the bar for posting/upvoting at "Actually fooled me".

The explicit guideline would be:

\- Post/upvote online if you think it's legit after reading the content. It's
OK to upvote even if you realize it's fake later (e.g. from comments) - this
is considered timeshifted voting not a violation of the guideline.

\- Don't flag/downvote on the sole basis believing it's a joke. Of course
flag/downvote as normal for any other reason, e.g. it sucks.

\- No addition restrictions on commenting, in particular mocking the OP is
perfectly OK [edit: so long you abide by the normal community guidelines of
civility etc]

------
eXpl0it3r
Quite useless post in my opinion. Since when are we told what to upvote and
what to flag? Do we get a "please flag Microsoft posts" when there's the next
big Microsoft event (example)?

If you can't handle a few bad jokes and lame stories, then stay of the news
for a day and come back the next one, instead of getting emotional about it...

And there's no need to justify "guys" as "gender-inclusive". It's already
known as such.

Can we now get back to the Hacker News without rules on what we have or don't
have to do?

~~~
dang
This site has a culture. That culture is to focus on intellectual curiosity.
It doesn't mean other things aren't also good; I personally love frivolous
humor. But HN can't be all things. It needs a focus, and optimizing for one
thing means trading away others, as in any engineering or design problem. The
real agenda behind my post is that we want to get the community participating
more in maintaining this culture. It's an experiment and it may not work, but
I hope it does.

------
netrus
I disagree, because I think the 1st of April has turned into a challenge
towards our own perception of news. While it is most often easy to detect an
April's fool, it is hard to rule out false positives. So many news stories are
so strange, so meaningless or so predictable that they might qualify as a
nonsense joke.

One day a year, we are asking ourselves for each and every article we read: Is
this story too odd to be true?

I think that's a good thing.

------
vacri
_(That 's a gender-inclusive "you guys".)_

Or you could just use gender-neutral language in the first place, if you're
concerned about being inclusive. "you folks", "my colleagues", even just
"you". There's a host of alternatives. It scans weirdly that you highlight
that the phrase might be taken the wrong way, but then choose to explain it
rather than alter it.

~~~
jwise0
I sent the following mail to Dan, too, but for others who might be confused at
why people take offense to an attempt at inclusiveness:

\---

I'm kind of surprised to see you explicitly call attention to your usage of
"you guys" in your post. I'd originally thought that I at least preferred it
to leaving "you guys" there unannounced ... but given a little more thinking,
I suspect it's actually _worse_. The subtext that you've provided there, to
people who do not identify as "guys", is 'I know you're there, and I know that
these words make some of you uneasy, but don't worry, I didn't mean to offend
you, I just really really wanted to use these words anyway; I think they're
worth the risk of offending you'.

I know what you were trying to get at -- you want to make Hacker News a better
place for /everyone/. (And thanks for that!) I'm sure you didn't intend that
meaning to non-guys, and I totally understand how that came about. But, given
that, I think that you might want to edit those words. Can I recommend the
usage of "you all", or if you want to be more colloquial, "you folks"?

~~~
dang
Point taken. I rewrote the phrase to "you all" before I saw this, so hopefully
I'm getting the hang of it.

~~~
jwise0
Thanks! Much appreciated.

------
jfoster
I'm very glad for this. The only problem I can foresee is knowing what
is/isn't an April Fools' joke. If I remember correctly, Gmail looked like it
might be an April Fools' joke when it was first announced on April 1. The
amount of storage on offer was so much higher than other webmail services that
it seemed almost too good to be true.

(Gmail is turning 10 today!)

------
sp8
I personally am tired of the April Fools stuff too but I have enough faith in
the HN community/mechanism to trust that only those things deemed worth it
will make the front page. I'm not against humour either, so can't/won't object
if good/funny/clever April Fools links get posted.

tl;dr: special measures not required, IMHO.

~~~
dang
The front page has never solely been the product of the community. It has
always been curated, if largely unobtrusively. Part of my aim here is to
appeal to the community to participate more in that. It's not just a question
of individual preference (upvote) but of the culture of the site and the
intellectual curiosity we're trying to optimize for.

------
lsc
Dude, April first is 'national do something besides read news' day. That's why
they post all those false stories. It's there for a reason. Go, get some work
done. Or go outside. Get laid. go for a walk.

April first is a day to sit back and contemplate something besides your echo-
chamber. Step outside of your filter bubble!

~~~
panacea
"Contemplate something besides your echo-chamber. Step outside of your filter
bubble!" he said, screaming into a vortex.

------
quaunaut
I'm actually really glad about this. For one, the Hiring Thread goes up today,
and if you want to see all the madness, you've got Twitter, TechCrunch, and
Reddit to supply you.

About the only thing I'll miss, is for the more impressive ones, technical
explanations. But beyond that, it's nice to have a place to breathe.

~~~
vacri
I don't hang out on Twitter, TechCrunch, or Reddit. There is one day a year
for such light-hearted japes... but apparently that's too many.

I see HN as a community, not a trove of tech and business
documentation/explanations. The proper place for communal documentation is a
wiki, not a forum. I mean, it's _one day_ that the entire Anglo culture knows
about, not just techies. You can gird your loins for one day, and have weeks
in preparation for it.

Personally, I can do without the obituaries when someone famous dies. The
single-to-noise ratio is so incredibly low - there's a small amount of
discussion of what the person did (repeated so many times), and a whole lot of
'oh, sad to see they died'. But hey, if I wait, the whole thing will blow over
in a day or two, no need to complain, nor pre-emptively get defensive about
being the 'obituary police'. I mean, after all, when someone famous in tech
dies, you've got Twitter, TechCrunch, and Reddit to supply you.

------
adav
We're not all weathered by many decades of lame April Fools! Think of the
younger geeks who may be drawn into the community and discussion by
particularly good tech gags :)

I have faith in the voting system that all but the good'uns will be filtered
out anyway. I respectfully suggest that this post is noise itself.

~~~
dang
Respectful suggestion respectfully received :)

Your faith in the voting system is misplaced, I'm afraid. Upvotes alone don't
keep HN HN.

But I've posted what feels like ten zillion comments in this thread, not to
mention plastering the whole site with them lately. I'm going to stop here.

------
slipstream-
Unfortunately, I've already seen at least one on the front page.

So... challenge failed before it even started <3

------
sjm
Down with fun!

------
rjd
Thanks, I opened 'zite' up on my tablet and it was mainly really
uninspired/mundane/transparent/poorly executed attempts at humor and I was
quite put off by it. Be glad for that crap not to surface here.

------
rdl
This is a target rich environment, like the kind of Warsaw Pact through Fulda
Gap scenario which convinced NATO putting TOW missile launchers on absolutely
every vehicle they had, and atomic landmines, would be a good idea.

Good hunting!

------
zbowling
I disagree at needing moderation around this. The community can moderate this
one. I know we can't downvote stories, only comments, but I think the better
content will win out if there is actually anything.

------
ozh
Why the hate? It's become the new cool to despise April's fool?

I admire companies that make up pranks. I really wish the megacorp I work for
would have the guts to break the monotony once a year too.

------
ancarda
Thank you for making this day less insufferable for me.

------
gadders
You're supposed to add "This is not Reddit." That is the canonical response
when anything less than serious is posted.

------
rmc
You correctly picked up how "you guys" could be read as non-gender inclusive
(and I speak an English dialect where it is gender inclusive), but you then
used "lame" which is a mild insult against people who are physically disabled.
Maybe choose a better word? I find insults based around poo to be better :)

~~~
seriocomic
With respect, if you go looking for inadvertent use of wide-meaning
colloquialisms that cause minor offence to the sensitive, then you will find
them.

~~~
rmc
To take this story more off topic, I think it's important to look at history.
There are phrases now that used to be "wide-meaning colloquialisms" but now
viewed as unprofessional, and used to be dismissed as "inadvertant(ly)"
causing "offence" to a 'tiny sensitive minority'. (e.g. calling women "baby").
That doesn't mean we shouldn't look at our words today.

------
l33tbro
i, for one, love the humorlessness. it's a haven from the lamers at Reddit.

