My precious comments...

HN has never been a very good environment for jokes. One of the big goals of HN was to optimize for signal, both quality and quantity. Jokes are noise. If you want to do Reddit-style pun threads, you can go to one of the many subreddits that welcomes those. There is no shortage of places to find jokes on the Internet, but there is a severe lack of places where you can find thoughtful comments by knowledgeable people.

Paul Graham wrote in one of his essays about Hacker News:

The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. … Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny.

… Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.

(What I've Learned From Hacker News: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)

HN has never been anti-joke but it's always been anti-distraction. You can make jokes on HN but the only way they're not going to be downvoted into oblivion is if they don't distract from the subject or are exceptionally funny.

Can I get an invite to Lobste.rs ?