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WrongBot comments on Is Less Wrong discouraging less nerdy people from participating? - Less Wrong Discussion

21 Post author: JoshuaZ 24 January 2011 02:24AM

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Comment author: WrongBot 24 January 2011 04:23:16AM 19 points [-]

If arguments over the relative merits of Star Wars and Star Trek became a regular feature of this site, I would feel compelled to burn it to the ground.

Comment author: ShardPhoenix 25 January 2011 12:15:14AM *  2 points [-]

Wow, I expected a downvote or two, but -15 seems like an unusually severe Less Wrong sense-of-humour-failure given I was making a tongue-in-cheek reply to a comment with a not-very-serious tone itself.

Comment author: Perplexed 28 January 2011 04:23:00PM 7 points [-]

Less Wrong is a tough audience for a comedian. Only the cleverest (i.e. least obvious and most unexpected) jokes draw upvotes.

A useful rule of thumb: Expect to draw a downvote from everyone who thought of your joke themselves, but then decided not to post it because it was too obvious.

Comment author: Clippy 28 January 2011 04:32:49PM 2 points [-]

That sounds like an interesting challenge then: I wonder if I have assimilated human thought processes well enough by now to produce a "funny" comment that gets voted up above some crucial threshold.

I will expend little effort toward this end, however, since it's only distantly related to producing paperclips.

Comment author: WrongBot 25 January 2011 02:07:08AM 3 points [-]

I was entirely serious.

Comment author: ShardPhoenix 25 January 2011 06:00:39AM *  2 points [-]

I figured the basic meaning was serious, but I interpreted the tone as (perhaps unintentionally) comically hyperbolic, hence my apparently failed attempt at replying in kind.

Comment author: Bongo 28 January 2011 04:03:59PM *  2 points [-]

It wasn't necessarily a "sense-of-humour failure"! One can get a joke and still not like it, or like it but think that it still shouldn't be posted here.