Are you ready for another pump and dump?
starts beating chest and humming
starts beating chest and humming
One of the best things PG ever said about HN is that comments "should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something". I intend to add that to the site guidelines.
Please re-read what you post and, if doesn't have this quality, edit it until it does. If, after editing, there is nothing left, you should have no trouble deleting it (or just not posting). In my experience, this approach works—when one remembers to take it.
It'd certainly flatten threads a bit, especially in the case of someone posting a factually incorrect comment and correcting it after the fact.
In HN's case, we're optimizing for signal/noise ratio. The trouble with humor on HN is not that it's bad, but that—if you have a lot of it—you also get a lot of noise. There actually is a genre of humor that does well on HN; you might call it high-signal humor. It's rare, but it exists. This comment wasn't that.
There are other places to get internet humor, like Reddit comment threads. When I read those I'm astonished at how good they are at what they do. HN is never going to be that, and we shouldn't allow an imitation of it to detract from our core.
But it's okay, I understand the concern.
Thank you for saying so.