[tdavis]

To be fair to them, this place is really boring, can't take a joke to save its life, and is often filled with the same sort of stories... but the major alternatives are so much worse by comparison that it's all worth it.

To quote myself from #startups, "HN basically has one type of person... a much better one type of person [than] youtube has, but still."

[trickjarrett]

I will disagree.

We can't 'take a joke' because the purpose of this site does not include humor. We have plenty of other places to go to look for something funny.

As for being boring, then this means to me that the content is not your cup of tea. Plenty of us spend a great deal of time on here reading and contributing.

And lastly, we're far from the same person. We have a niche we reach to so people come from similar places in terms of goals and projects, we're fairly heavy on the programming entrepreneur, but it's still not the 'same person.' We're much closer to the same person than the much broader Reddit, sure.

But the amount of discourse and discussion on this site is quite evident as proof that we have varying opinions.

[tdavis]

Perhaps boring was the wrong word... "stuffy", maybe? Look, I love HN as much as the next guy; it's the only link aggregation / commenting site I visit. And there is indeed a lot of good content here.

The site lacks personality and that's probably why people who are otherwise "smart enough" (or whatever metric you wish to use) to post here don't. Since there's no personality and usernames are deliberately downplayed in leu of every comment being judged strictly on its individual quality, there's no diversity. This is why I say "everyone is the same person".

Think of a close group of friends. Could you randomly interchange them without anybody noticing? Probably not, but you could easily do that on HN. All you are to me is "one of those guys who holds the opinion that HN is <fill in your arguments>". There are lots and lots of you and you're all the same to me. There are people here like me, too, and we're probably all the same to you.

I don't really "know" anyone on HN; it isn't a community in that sense. It's just a group of like-minded people who hold the standard deviation of opinions regarding a (relatively small) set of topics. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

(edit: of course this isn't the reality of the situation -- I'm sure everyone here is not the same in "real life", but due to how HN is setup and run, for all intents and purposes they are here.)

[jhancock]

I agree folks should not waste space with comments that are purely for amusement. However, I have noticed that if a comment is on-topic and still adds humor, it can be taken very poorly. I agree: "we're far from the same person". Humor is often the best way to open minds in a diverse group. Alcohol works as well for breaking the ice, but its hard to induce that online ;).

[codinghorror]

To me, the idea that fun and "serious discussion"/work are mututally exclusive is the biggest disappointment of the HN culture. And it's just not true!

For me, if it's not fun, it's not worth doing:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081101/how-hard-could-it-be-th... -- For his part, Jeff says he didn't want our new venture to feel "like work" -- that if Stack Overflow wasn't fun to do, he didn't want to be doing it. If I had tried to make him play by my rules, I don't think the project would have come together, at least not as well as it has. --

Good work is fun, almost by definition. And that should come across in your comments about the work, too.

[web3]

Aside from the good stories, I like knowing that I can read intelligible, mostly interesting comments here. Sometimes I just don't want to hear quip after quip.

[tdavis]

I fail to see at which point I recommended HN be comprised of "quip after quip". Or you've assumed that there is some sort of all-or-nothing requirement between quips and intelligible comments.

[jbm]

Don't you find that humor feeds a positive cycle that results in it being inevitably over-represented in the body of comments made on a website? I know that is one of the reasons I can't stand reading the comments at Digg anymore.