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Oh come on, -3 points? It was a joke, people! I upvoted because he beat me to it AND because I agree with him. I'm not seeing the negative downturn.


You're not as funny as you think you are.


Perhaps I was too terse, and it appeared I was trying to make a (meta) joke. I was not. If you ever find yourself thinking "It's just a joke!" you have to consider that the problem is with you, not the reader. Most people amuse themselves, but few people are actually funny. Your jokes will generally not be appreciated by others, particularly when you go for the obvious, aggressively ironic one-liners.

Such things get downvoted as part of the noise.


True. One of the things I like about this place is that one-liners are frowned upon, even when they're somewhat funny.

I feel that policy should be extended to sarcasm. Sarcasm doesn't work very well on the net, and is often rude and dismissive.

What I used to like about Slashdot was that you could give the +funny modding a -1 weight. This improved Slashdot discussions quite a bit.


Uh oh. I did the same before seeing yours. Maybe sense of humor is the real problem here.


Disrespect is never funny.


I got downvoted one time by the same reason, but getting back to the subject, I really like the feedback guys receive when "asking HN", the community is always there to help who needs, I can't see this bad environment here (maybe few guys with bad sense of humor).


Sometimes, humor is not rewarded here. Even if during the process it is making a point.

I've met quite a few hackers/cs guys who take themselves WAY too seriously. Maybe that's why they don't have girlfriends.

Sometimes it feels like the vibe here can lean towards "I'm a super serious hacker who knows his/her shit and I'm going to be a millionaire with my start up, so I'm going to ignore the SPIRIT of your post and pick it apart like a trekkie at a convention."

In the end, we all need to just get over ourselves.


In what spirit should calling someone a 'twit' be taken? Should we pretend that it's an insightful social commentary? Or accept that it's a cheap attempt at humor based in disrespect for others?


Theres an important difference between being a sarcastic jerk at someone else's expense and pointing out the irony in situations that results in humor.

Its been my experience that either type of humor isn't tolerated here very well.




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