I think there’s a place for humor on LW. I think there are some places where humor in the middle of a serious discussion can happen. But if it happened all the time it’d be extremely disruptive.
I think an actual good equilibrium is “you can make jokes at the expense of the discussion clarity. If so, you may get a combination of ‘downvotes that effect your longterm karma’, but also ‘haha’ reacts rewarding your humor. And it’s sort of up to you whether this is worth it.” (I would change my mind if it happened a lot)
(On the original thread, someone suggested making the joke as a comment rather than an official Question Answer. I think the joke is funnier if it’s an answer, and so long as that doesn’t happen often I think it’s fine. I personally found it pretty hilarious in context, but admittedly I’m fairly far on the ‘likes bad puns and worse meta-humor’ spectrum)
[I expect this to be a more controversial opinion that other mods don’t necessarily share, curious what people think about the general principle]
If I’m deciding whether to post a comment, and my worry is an impact on my long term karma versus how many little dopamine hits I’ll get from reactions, that feels like exactly the types of questions I want to avoid in my life. If either of these things is driving my decision, rather than what would help build knowledge or be useful to myself and others, then I’d consider it time to pack it in and stop posting entirely.
Huh. This feels like the exactly the sort of question I’m normally navigating when deciding whether to make a bad pun in the middle of a serious meeting. Maybe the joke is good enough that everyone likes it and I come out neutral to positive on “business relationship points”, but maybe not, but maybe I actually care enough about the entirely orthogonal “guy who makes bad puns points” to do it anyway.
The choices come down to either:
people are encouraged to make jokes on LW willy-nilly
people are encouraged to not make jokes on LW
people can make jokes sometimes but it’s highly context dependent and you have to navigate social situations to be able to do it.
And it sort of seems like it just has to be the third one.
I’m somewhat surprised that this is your view, in part because awhile ago someone on LW asked a slightly annoying question, and lost some karma, and someone said “it seems kinda bad that this person lost karma for asking a question” and you said “I dunno they asked a sort of annoying question, paid some karma, but got the answer to the question, which seemed like a fine trade that should be okay to make sometimes.” It’s not exactly the same concept here but seemed like a pretty similar principle.
(Since then we’ve implemented the questions feature which sends different signals about how and whether it’s okay to ask questions, but I think the original principle was pretty fine at the time)
It’s not that you don’t have to track those points in the meeting as part of your decision. You definitely do. It’s that if the primary reason you’re doing anything in the meeting is so that you can maximize various point totals to seem like a good meeting-attender, then the meeting is no longer serving its original intended purpose and you’re stuck in a signaling nightmare (and likely a moral maze). Remember that (almost) everyone hates meetings and wants to avoid them. Being caught in a continuous permanently-available meeting of that type seems like something to avoid.
I do agree that we want there to be jokes when they are high-value and not when they are low-value, like most other things, but I’d like this to be about questions like “will this help this discussion accomplish something worthwhile and illustrate the questions involved?” and “is it funny and therefore Worth It to tell this?”
In terms of the answer I gave earlier, I totally stand by that—losing a little karma is a (small) price of a negative dopamine hit and a small hit to total karma, and the karma gives the message that the question was annoying so they can update that they’re imposing real costs, and sometimes it’s worth imposing real costs and taking small status hits to do things anyway. I was more pushing back against this idea that “If you get negative karma on a post/comment you should react as if this is a crisis situation and you are bad and should feel bad.”
The comment that triggered this is actually a pretty good case study of a particular kind of thing.
I think there’s a place for humor on LW. I think there are some places where humor in the middle of a serious discussion can happen. But if it happened all the time it’d be extremely disruptive.
I think an actual good equilibrium is “you can make jokes at the expense of the discussion clarity. If so, you may get a combination of ‘downvotes that effect your longterm karma’, but also ‘haha’ reacts rewarding your humor. And it’s sort of up to you whether this is worth it.” (I would change my mind if it happened a lot)
(On the original thread, someone suggested making the joke as a comment rather than an official Question Answer. I think the joke is funnier if it’s an answer, and so long as that doesn’t happen often I think it’s fine. I personally found it pretty hilarious in context, but admittedly I’m fairly far on the ‘likes bad puns and worse meta-humor’ spectrum)
[I expect this to be a more controversial opinion that other mods don’t necessarily share, curious what people think about the general principle]
If I’m deciding whether to post a comment, and my worry is an impact on my long term karma versus how many little dopamine hits I’ll get from reactions, that feels like exactly the types of questions I want to avoid in my life. If either of these things is driving my decision, rather than what would help build knowledge or be useful to myself and others, then I’d consider it time to pack it in and stop posting entirely.
Huh. This feels like the exactly the sort of question I’m normally navigating when deciding whether to make a bad pun in the middle of a serious meeting. Maybe the joke is good enough that everyone likes it and I come out neutral to positive on “business relationship points”, but maybe not, but maybe I actually care enough about the entirely orthogonal “guy who makes bad puns points” to do it anyway.
The choices come down to either:
people are encouraged to make jokes on LW willy-nilly
people are encouraged to not make jokes on LW
people can make jokes sometimes but it’s highly context dependent and you have to navigate social situations to be able to do it.
And it sort of seems like it just has to be the third one.
I’m somewhat surprised that this is your view, in part because awhile ago someone on LW asked a slightly annoying question, and lost some karma, and someone said “it seems kinda bad that this person lost karma for asking a question” and you said “I dunno they asked a sort of annoying question, paid some karma, but got the answer to the question, which seemed like a fine trade that should be okay to make sometimes.” It’s not exactly the same concept here but seemed like a pretty similar principle.
(Since then we’ve implemented the questions feature which sends different signals about how and whether it’s okay to ask questions, but I think the original principle was pretty fine at the time)
It’s not that you don’t have to track those points in the meeting as part of your decision. You definitely do. It’s that if the primary reason you’re doing anything in the meeting is so that you can maximize various point totals to seem like a good meeting-attender, then the meeting is no longer serving its original intended purpose and you’re stuck in a signaling nightmare (and likely a moral maze). Remember that (almost) everyone hates meetings and wants to avoid them. Being caught in a continuous permanently-available meeting of that type seems like something to avoid.
I do agree that we want there to be jokes when they are high-value and not when they are low-value, like most other things, but I’d like this to be about questions like “will this help this discussion accomplish something worthwhile and illustrate the questions involved?” and “is it funny and therefore Worth It to tell this?”
In terms of the answer I gave earlier, I totally stand by that—losing a little karma is a (small) price of a negative dopamine hit and a small hit to total karma, and the karma gives the message that the question was annoying so they can update that they’re imposing real costs, and sometimes it’s worth imposing real costs and taking small status hits to do things anyway. I was more pushing back against this idea that “If you get negative karma on a post/comment you should react as if this is a crisis situation and you are bad and should feel bad.”