[dang]

This is not a good Hacker News comment. It's glib when it should be substantive, and tries to drum up indignation when it should be reflective.

One of the best things PG ever said about HN is that comments "should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something". I intend to add that to the site guidelines.

Please re-read what you post and, if doesn't have this quality, edit it until it does. If, after editing, there is nothing left, you should have no trouble deleting it (or just not posting). In my experience, this approach works—when one remembers to take it.

[daeken]

One thing that I'd love to see is a system for adaptive edit/delete windows. Right now it seems to be a fixed length of time (I want to say an hour?), but I think it'd be conducive to better conversation to have flexible windows, where -- and maybe this isn't the right approach -- the window is extended by X minutes for every reply, or something along those lines.

It'd certainly flatten threads a bit, especially in the case of someone posting a factually incorrect comment and correcting it after the fact.

[thix0tr0pic]

In which case the original comment should stay as on so anyone can see what happened, but use strike-through formatting

[highace]

I thought it was funny.

[dang]

It may have been, and I like to laugh too. As with any optimization problem, there are tradeoffs. It's not that you're against the things that get traded away; you're for them. But you're for something else more, if you can't have both.

In HN's case, we're optimizing for signal/noise ratio. The trouble with humor on HN is not that it's bad, but that—if you have a lot of it—you also get a lot of noise. There actually is a genre of humor that does well on HN; you might call it high-signal humor. It's rare, but it exists. This comment wasn't that.

There are other places to get internet humor, like Reddit comment threads. When I read those I'm astonished at how good they are at what they do. HN is never going to be that, and we shouldn't allow an imitation of it to detract from our core.

[pearjuice]

If you didn't jump on my back to force some community guidelines down our throats, I would have been at the top of this thread with high XX-range karma. :-(

But it's okay, I understand the concern.

[dang]

But it's okay, I understand the concern.

Thank you for saying so.