Title: (I&#x27;m going to rewrite this, because people have made some good points in the thread.)<p>Most April Fools&#x27; gags in tech are lame. Only the very best ones, such as those that show hackery ingenuity, deserve much attention on HN. I propose that we, or rather you, flag the others off the front page.<p>After plodding through them much of March 31 (where I am), I realized I was dreading the next 24 hours of having to read so many lame stories and decide which are real. Then I thought it might turn into a positive if I appealed to you all instead. This is a plea! You don&#x27;t have to do it, but in my view it will help.<p>A word about humorlessness, since it&#x27;s bound to come up. People who complain about HN&#x27;s humorlessness have a point, but not because we&#x27;re against humor. We like laughing as much as anyone. It&#x27;s because empirically, a culture of humor means a flood of lame humor, and HN&#x27;s goal is to optimize for signal&#x2F;noise ratio. As with any optimization, there are inevitably tradeoffs.
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