The keyword is "alongside intellectual curiosity". If you can make a point in a funny manner, do it. But if just making jokes becomes accepted, jokes drown out everything else, simply because they are infinite. Like all those gaming subreddits that consist 99% of "funny thing that just happened" or "this reference to a thing that occurs in the game, which you can recognize as occurring in the game to confirm that you have, indeed, played that game". You can call that socializing but to me it's just turning everything into everything/nothing forums. If HN becomes soft on that, we need a new HN.

Nothing wrong with humor, but on a completely personal level, it does frustrate me when the top comment is entirely superficial, since it adds nothing to the conversation. And subjectively, it feels like there's been an uptick in joke / meme / information-free comments and their ranking in the wake of recent Twitter and Reddit turmoil.

But hey, I've been here for 15 years, and forum cultures change over time. I wouldn't overindex on my feelings.

What's ironic is the tangential threads complaining about humor on HN throw far more noise and entropy into these threads than the jokes themselves. People could have just ignored it, or downvoted it and moved on, but no, someone made a joke and now we need to stop the car and have discourse about how HN is turning into Reddit. Knuckles must be rapped. Fingers wagged and pearls clutched. Again.

It disturbs people's autism apparently.