My instinct was to agree with the comment above, but after giving it a few minutes I think I'd rather have a moderated "soulless" HN.

It seems to me that there is a fine line between innocent jokes and full-blown juvenile behaviour. The amount of effort you would need to invest into sustaining such a place is not worth it, best to just not allow it at all. There are plenty of places where you can get your dose of jokes and fun. One thing that keeps immature and rude people away is precisely the "dullness" that the post above speaks of. People get tired and move on, leaving the place clean and tidy for others to use.

HN has problems of course; downvote bullying is one of them. I'm not saying HN is perfect, but I'd rather not turn it into Reddit or Youtube. So I don't know where this leaves HN between the "pub" and "commercial street".

I prefer it this way. I would love to see original jokes on HN, but the issue is that if you allow "jokes" in general, there's a flood of low-effort repetition of popular phrases or comments where the only "comedic" value is that they've forced something into a cliche sentence structure. That feels more soulless than the way HN is, because comments get so samey. You see the same effect sort of start to creep in on certain political posts, where people feel that they can achieve a cheap sense of attention and comradery for expressing a trite idea instead of a joke (comments that mostly amount to "Elon Musk is a mean man! Who else agrees???")

I think HN is fine as it is.

I come here because it is one of the very few places where you can have interesting discussions and read interesting comments from people with a similar intent and interest.

The library, the café or the debate club maybe.

The café was the first pub-like place where people did mostly not drink alcohol. Reportedly, it was an inportant place for the enlightenment period of history. Let's not oversell HN here, though...

Central European cafes sell spirits, too. A cognac makes a fine accompaniment to a coffee. It is foreign franchise coffee places like Starbucks don't sell alcohol at all, and that is a major part of why they feel so foreign.

They do, but the general atmosphere is far less boozy anyway.

Some years ago, a friend introduced me to caffè corretto - espresso with grappa. Pretty good stuff, too.

There are many very different kinds of humor. I think HN generally allows some "insightful" or "never thought of it that way" jokes. Which is probably a narrow subset of humor in general and often requires quite a lot of knowledge about the subject matter.

Only accepting humor if it's sufficiently serious is poser behavior. It reeks of insecurity.

Some of the most brilliant people in history also had an often juvenile sense of humor. Hacker culture was born out of puns and memes and Discordianism and Monty Python references.

But we don't do that here. We're serious people having serious discussions on serious topics. Look at how serious we are. Like that monocle guy meme, except replace the glass of wine with a can of Gamersupps mixed with adderall.

I think some of that stuff also works, if it is at least somewhat ambitious. Say, "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" is absurd and humorous but gets a lot of appreciation.