Meta-discussions can be tiresome, but communities die if content is chosen strictly by popularity. Some moderation must be applied, and the most important things to moderate are the things that are popular but subtly undermine the site's purpose.
In this particular case the poster is being very reasonable: no lame submissions. "Joel on Coal" is a good example. That might have been funny as h*ll back when Joel was blogging. Now that he's no longer blogging, it doesn't work nearly as well as a satire. But it is funny, and perhaps worth an upvote nearly any other day of the year.
But on this day? No. It isn't actually going to "fool" anyone. April first isn't a generalized satire day, it's about pranks. And "Joel on Coal" isn't a prank, nobody is going to read that and wonder if Joel Spolsky is writing about Coal.
p.s. If you pranked me by pretending that HN has a good track record for dealing with OT submissions, I say "well-played" and redouble my argument in favour of moderating April 1st submissions: Your comment is funnier than most of the so-called prank posts I've seen.
EDIT: I wonder if there's an analogy here for democracies and recent US legislation: the most important things to moderate are the things that are popular but subtly undermine the site's purpose.
(Oh noes! I've added politics to a meta-discussion! [dons asbestos long johns and ducks])
MetaFilter (one of the longest-running communities on the web) has a policy where all meta talk goes to a separate silo (MetaTalk) so that discussions on actual topics don't get derailed. StackOverflow does the same thing.
The assumption "Lots of people want to see it, therefore it is worthy" is false on its face. Lots of people want to see "Barney & Friends," but it is not appropriate for must venues — the people who want to see it are almost exclusively children. If your postulate were correct, we would all just be on Slashdot and Digg, since people have always been able to vote there and thus the exact same content would be on top in a pure and open democracy.
Solving the problem of users voting up stupid stories and ruining the S:N ratio was one of the founding goals of HN. It is supposed to be a different kind of content, not just whatever the masses think is funny — and we need to try to ensure that or the site will become no better than Slashdot.
I think the only (scalable) way to ensure that is to only bring "good" people into HN. After all, if you want a scalable solution, the community has to be self-moderating to some degree. And if you can't trust "the masses" on the site, then you can't trust the moderation. The only solution that makes sense is to only bring good people into the community.
HN does this in a few ways:
1. Most people finding HN find it through pg's articles and through Y Combinator, which already means they're probably alright.
2. HN's loop works well. We only discuss interesting things, downvote comments don't say anything intelligent, even if they're funny jokes, etc. Therefore, people who aren't interested in intelligent conversations find somewhere else to go. Keeping HN alive and kicking.
I'm sorry you got some downvotes, because what you're asking about is interesting: Am I merely saying "Don't post stuff I don't like?"
I don't think that I'm asking people not to post stuff I don't like. For one think I like some of the stuff I'm asking people not to post. Yes, I like lame jokes. I don't think "lame" and "dislike" are strongly correlated. If people upvote something, it could be popular yet lame in some way. And if people don't want to see it on HN, they might still like it.
Here's an example. I like puns. I especially like spur of the moment puns. But quite honestly, puns are usually a fairly low form of joke. They rarely have any kind of serious insight into the human condition. I don't mull over puns and repeat them as anecdotes years later.
So, I can tell you that something to do with a pun would be (a) enjoyable to me, but (b) lame, therefore (c) I wouldn't submit it to HN, I'd probably tweet it.
We aren't really discussing puns, but i use them to try to illustrate the idea that there are things that I might like or you might like that are funny and fun and worth repeating, but they don't necessarily belong on HN. I don't blame you for liking such things, just as I'm not ashamed of enjoying a pun.
So perhaps "lame" is a bad word, because it is pejorative. Perhaps the suggestion might be "Don't post April Fool stories that lack any real insight or clever prank that takes you in." Lame might be the wrong word.
But I think the idea is worth discussion, the question of whether there are things someone likes that shouldn't be on HN. I agree that the rule "Don't post stuff I don't like" is wrong, as is any proxy for that idea.
And thank you for raising an interesting question.
I get what you're saying, and I agree. I happen to love a lot of the funny one-line comments on Reddit. They're often hilarious. And on Reddit, they get massively upvoted, whereas here we don't like them (). But in general, the spirit of HN is to only* post things which are intellectually interesting for hackers.
But on this specific day, which is a "holiday" in some sense, I think it's alright to submit jokes. That's because a lot of us members who use HN as their only (tech) news source, do want to see these posts. And it's only for one day, anyway. Analogy - on other holidays, or on other special occasions, things to do with the occasion come up a lot. Honestly this is just from memory, but I'm guessing that on Christmas, there are plenty of threads with holiday greetings and wishes, resolutions for New Year's, etc. Even though many people here (including me) don't celebrate Christmas, I don't think there's anything wrong with special occasions "clouding" the home page.
* By the way, the fact that Reddit-style one-liners are usually downvoted shows that the spirit here is still pretty much the old HN spirit. No "moderation" necessary, the community usually does its part.
but communities die if content is chosen strictly by popularity
Too much melodrama from everyone. Lame April Fools 'news' is created and submitted every year, we all know it's coming, so maybe just avoid discussion sites for a day and move on.
Ha ha...you almost had me there. I get it: your april fool's joke is that you're imagining that the community has a history of dealing with these things without going meta.
> Can we also skip the submissions asking people not to post things
No. See: http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html. In particular "The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting."
