Slashdot was fun and I too learned some amazingly arcane stuff on certain topics. HN does have humor sometimes, one of my favorite threads is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12781157 looks towards the bottom. I guess we all need to be serious these days lest someone doesn't see the funny. Slashdot was pretty amazing for a community policing itself as opposed to making moderators do a lot of the heavy hauling, but you really need people to stick around and do the work.