"Today" was hardly the bulk of April Fools' Day, and the front page was "clean enough" because people worked hard to keep it that way.
I've been keeping a close eye on this. What swayed me was how many more April Fools' posts were appearing on March 31 (where I am) than I previously remember.
I do appreciate that not everyone agrees, but I want to send a message about signal/noise ratio. That's HN's mantra. We can't have that and everything else as well; there are tradeoffs.
The objection that this and other meta posts I've been making are also noise is a good one, except that this is a special case while we go through a transitional period. I won't be making them forever.
I sure wish it were true that the community is already optimizing for signal/noise ratio, but it's not. We have a serious problem with that and we're going to try a lot of things to fix it.
Yes, but we have up and down voting of posts, which is inherently democratic - if we like stuff, we'll upvote it, and if it's a lame joke, we'll downvote it. And thus SNR is maintained. Why is there a problem here? Surely what you're kind of verging on, is telling us what we should and shouldn't enjoy?
You have a valid question, and I've thought about this a lot. When you have a very large audience it's depressingly easy to have lots and lots of quick upvotes for something that's genuinely content-free. There are plenty of places on the interwebs where you can find amusing material, but it feels to me that there is a real danger of the intellectually challenging and enriching material being swamped as we "amuse ourselves to death."
I don't think this is a case of telling people what to enjoy, it's more a case of trying to keep the original flavor and culture. HN is certainly an unusual corner of the 'net, and I value it.
Added in edit: And you can't actually downvote posts, you can only flag them. Unless I'm missing something, or possibly haven't hit the karma threshold yet. Which seems unlikely.
I was also keeping an eye on HN (mostly because, well, my country has seen the April Fools' Day hours before US and I was procrastinating sigh) and the trend so far was out of my expectation. I first thought that the moderators are working very hard to keep jokes out of the front page, but after some hours I started to think that the community keeps posting lots of signals in order to combat higher-than-normal noises.
Given my observation and the circumstance that you have posted the original post in the middle of April Fools' Day over the globe, I thought your post was quite inappropriate and it would challenge trolls instead, hence the flagging (as a substitute for downvote). I appreciate your concern and thank you for your service, but please keep it mind that not only moderators are concerning.
I've seen lots of legitimate but less important stories out of the front page compared to normal days so I thought it is not only the penalty that the front page seemed to be clean. It might be my misconception though, and again I fully appreciate the moderation efforts.
I'm not sure I can rephrase the second paragraph better and the following analogy fits well, but I think the principle of "do not feed trolls" equally applies here. Every moderator post about the current matter signals trolls, which we want to avoid as much as possible (and we have hellbans for the reason). In my humble opinion it would be better to deliver the statistics or even small notice well before and/or after the April Fools' Day for asking communities' help and coordination.
I've been keeping a close eye on this. What swayed me was how many more April Fools' posts were appearing on March 31 (where I am) than I previously remember.
I do appreciate that not everyone agrees, but I want to send a message about signal/noise ratio. That's HN's mantra. We can't have that and everything else as well; there are tradeoffs.
The objection that this and other meta posts I've been making are also noise is a good one, except that this is a special case while we go through a transitional period. I won't be making them forever.
I sure wish it were true that the community is already optimizing for signal/noise ratio, but it's not. We have a serious problem with that and we're going to try a lot of things to fix it.