It's about HN increasingly becoming like Reddit.

(And yes, that's a joke too.)

Have you never had an inside joke with someone? It's not about exclusion, it's about connecting with someone else (most of the time anyway).

But whether or not the point is exclusion, I don't think you can deny that inside jokes foster a feeling of isolation for those not in the know.

Especially when you post it to your very public blog. Who is this post meant for?

It's meant for everyone, from the cool people who got it right away at the A table where Paul and Harj sit (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371321 ), right on down to the D table where people like me and you sit. You can't have popular without unpopular.

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

... and the people at the E table are the hellbanned ones like losethos / SparrowOS, who incidentally might just get up and leave if someone at the A table told them nobody was allowed to talk to them.

Just because a side effect isn't the main intent of the function doesn't actually stop the side effect from happening.

Go re-read the comment I was responding to carefully. Both you and the other commenter completely missed my point.

Increasing your connection with someone else through an inside joke cuts off anyone who both hears it and isn't in on the joke. That's why the last time georgeorwell encountered inside jokes was in high school: someone else made the joke, he didn't get it, but everyone else did.

Of course georgeorwell has almost assuredly heard inside jokes since. The difference was that he got it and it didn't occur to him that other people wouldn't.

Yes well you're now part of a super secret club of cool people.

At least this one is funny. pg is really overestimating the HN brand and the obviousness of the joke if he really thinks that t-shirt was a "pretty bold assertion of brand power" (which is the point ju6ernaut was making when he asked, "would someone who frequents HN recognize it if they did not already know its affiliation" (emphasis mine)).

I've been here a long time and that shirt wouldn't make me look twice (if I hadn't happened to have seen it on HN that day). That's not a very good inside joke.