Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom from butt jokes. - Thomas Jefferson

Another non-HN like comment. Please refrain.

In defense of the curmudgeon, the mature atmosphere of HN is quite rare and, frankly, refreshing.

Other discussion sites that have a "vote to the top" system similar to Hacker News usually get _flooded_ with low effort humor posts, to the point where it's hard to find any actual interesting comments on the subject. It's not difficult to see why - it's a lot easier to make a small comment with a pun than a longer thought out comment (so output is greater), it's a lot faster as well (the fastest comments are the most likely to stick to the top), and it's a lot easier to vote for your comment. Someone reads something for five seconds, smirks, and gives an upvote, instead of deciding whether or not to spend a couple of minutes reading a comment and thinking about whether or not the agree with the point being made.

Interestingly, this never seemed to be a big deal with the old forums. The upvote system seems to really encourage a certain type of behavior (small low effort comments that lack substance).