<story><title>Can we skip the lame April Fool&apos;s submissions?</title><text>Every year the Internet goes through this lame ritual of making up stuff and trying to pretend it&apos;s real. Very little of it is believable. Even less of it, funny. I can through the submissions today and I see at least half, just by the title, are lame April Fool&apos;s submissions.&lt;p&gt;Can we just skip it?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>rewind</author><text>Can we also skip the submissions asking people not to post things instead of just letting the community decide the same way it&apos;s been done for years?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raganwald</author><text>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&apos;s purpose.&lt;p&gt;In this particular case the poster is being very reasonable: no &lt;i&gt;lame&lt;/i&gt; submissions. &quot;Joel on Coal&quot; is a good example. That might have been funny as h*ll back when Joel was blogging. Now that he&apos;s no longer blogging, it doesn&apos;t work nearly as well as a satire. But it is funny, and perhaps worth an upvote nearly any other day of the year.&lt;p&gt;But on this day? No. It isn&apos;t actually going to &quot;fool&quot; anyone. April first isn&apos;t a generalized satire day, it&apos;s about pranks. And &quot;Joel on Coal&quot; isn&apos;t a prank, nobody is going to read that and wonder if Joel Spolsky is writing about Coal.&lt;p&gt;p.s. If you pranked me by pretending that HN has a good track record for dealing with OT submissions, I say &quot;well-played&quot; and redouble my argument in favour of moderating April 1st submissions: Your comment is funnier than most of the so-called prank posts I&apos;ve seen.</text></comment>
<story><title>Can we skip the lame April Fool&apos;s submissions?</title><text>Every year the Internet goes through this lame ritual of making up stuff and trying to pretend it&apos;s real. Very little of it is believable. Even less of it, funny. I can through the submissions today and I see at least half, just by the title, are lame April Fool&apos;s submissions.&lt;p&gt;Can we just skip it?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>rewind</author><text>Can we also skip the submissions asking people not to post things instead of just letting the community decide the same way it&apos;s been done for years?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pohl</author><text>Ha ha...you almost had me there.  I get it: your april fool&apos;s joke is that you&apos;re imagining that the community has a history of dealing with these things without going meta.&lt;p&gt;Good one!</text></comment>