I come to Hacker News to read and interact with people about start-ups and hacking related news, not to read jokes. It's not that I don't like to laugh, but there are a lot more popular sites on the web where you can be distracted and read funny stuff than there are where you can have quality discussions on a specific topic with interesting people like Hacker News.

This is rare. While community-oriented sites where you can read jokes/hilarious stuff/trolls are common and all over the place.

So when I want to be distracted, all I have to do is to open a new tab and go to reddit or whatever. HN is a special environment that must be preserved from this kind of stuff in order to keep the focused and quality discussions going on.

This is exactly my opinion too. There are so many communities that are internet link dumps that offer a ton of crap content. That was great when I had a ton of time to sit and browse through it all. But I'm growing up and trying be become a better programmer, trying to start some projects that take off, and in general no matter if I'm working at my day job or on my startup at home, trying to keep a good solid work ethic. When I need a break or I'm bored I browse HN and not only find things that interest me, but find things that help me work towards my goals.

We already have reddit for hilarity. As one reddit commenter put it, "don't go over to yc. it's no fun there cuz they're all serious and shit."

You're sure it wasn't "there"...?

Stories get killed every day, sometimes even automatically. In fact, that's the reason for the showdead option in your profile-- so if you want to see all the spam, trolls, and offtopic submissions, you can.

http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

Does YC really get much spam? As of 3/1/08 10am PDT, scrolling through the 180 visible "new" articles with showdead set to yes revealed 3 [dead] stories: the sex one mentioned in this thread, something about sharks and an acne medication one.

Come to think of it, a profile option to increase (or decrease) the effective gravity for articles posted by users who post articles marked [dead] in the last few days could be useful to monitor this.

Or even something as simple as a /dead view.

Not a huge amount. Occasionally a spammer will fill up half the new page, but most only submit a link or two at a time.

I think a lot of us came from reddit and stayed here BECAUSE we don't want those posts. Very rarely do I ever check the reddit front page anymore. I mostly stick to proggramming.reddit. Hacker news IMO should be edited to keep it going down the reddit road. Not to bash on reddit, if I want to see stupid pictures or read or post politic news thats where I go, but HN filters out a lot of noise. I'm thankful for that.

I can see it, because my settings are set to see dead items.

And it isn't censorship when the code for the forum is publicly available. This is private property, not the pissing ground of trolls. You have no right to post here. You must respect the owners and curators of the site.

I would say the most important reason to kill the thread is that it isn't something you would say to someones face. That rubric works really well to judge whether it is appropriate for a forum like this, trying to host interesting content.

This website is controlled by a secretive cabal of fascists plotting a coup of the Internet. As such, all dissent will be dealt with swiftly.

As we speak brown-shirted storm troopers are converging upon your apartment. You know too much. The system has turned against you. Go! Run for your life!

Yes, please.

No, censored is when it's reviewed before publication. Hacker News is edited however, and in some rare cases spam/troll posts are deleted, like on this occasion.

Well said. And thank god for editors.