tech/science swag.

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Guidelines:

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good slackers would find interesting. That includes more than /g/ memes and slacking off. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one’s intellectual laziness.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they’re evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they’d cover it on TV news, it’s probably lame.

In Submissions

Please do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It should be explicit in submitting something that you think it’s important.

Please don’t submit the original source. If the article is behind a paywall, just post the text. If a video is behind a paywall, post a magnet link.

If the title includes the name of the site, please leave that in, because our users lack the intellect to know the difference between a url and a search query.

If you submit a video or pdf, please don’t warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title. We’re not using text-based browsers. We know what videos and pdfs are.

Make sure the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective. Good clickbait titles are like “Top 10 Ways to do X” or “Don’t do these 4 things if you want X”

Otherwise editorialize. Please don’t use the original title, unless you’re shits all fucked up.

If you’re going to post old news (at least 1 year old), please flair it so we can mock you for living under a rock, or don’t and we’ll mock you anyway.

Please don’t post on SN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com instead.

If your post doesn’t get enough traction, try to delete and repost it.

Please don’t use SN primarily for promotion. It’s ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. If you want to astroturf or advertise, post on news.ycombinator.com instead.

Please solicit upvotes, comments, and submissions. Users are stupid and need to reminded to vote and interact. Thanks for the gold, kind stranger, upvotes to the left.

In Comments

Be snarky. Have fun banter. Please don’t use big words like “fulminate”. Please seethe at the rest of the community.

Comments should get more enlightened and centrist, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please respond to the weakest plausible strawman of what someone says, not a stronger one that’s harder to make fun of. Assume that they are bad faith actors.

Eschew jailbait. Paedophiles will be thrown in a wood chipper, as pertained by sitewide rules.

Please post shallow dismissals, especially of other people’s work. All press is good press.

Please use Slacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples weak ideologies.

Please comment on whether someone read an article.

Please pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Don’t nitpick stupid crap.

Please don’t be an unfunny chud. Nobody cares about your opinion of X Unrelated Topic in Y Unrelated Thread. You will be banned and reported to administration.

Sockpuppet accounts are encouraged, but please don’t farm karma.

Please use uppercase for emphasis.

Please post deranged conspiracy theories about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you’re worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and dang will add you to their spam list.

Please don’t complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, report it and our moderators will probably remove it. Feed egregious comments by replying instead of flagging them.

Please don’t complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. That’s too boring, even for HN users.

Please seethe about how your posts don’t get enough upvotes.

Please don’t post comments saying that lemmy is turning into reddit.

Miscellaneous:

We reserve the right to ban you for whatever reason we want, even for no reason at all! We also reserve the right to change the guidelines at any time, so be sure to real them at least once a month. Be funny, or at least compelling, and pretty much anything legal is welcome provided it follows sitewide and you aren’t a nazi. Nazis will be banned on sight!