Everyone likes to laugh. The problem is that joking in real life during a whiteboarding session here and there in a lull or a in a difficult moment is a cut fro

Everyone likes to laugh. The problem is that joking in real life during a whiteboarding session here and there in a lull or a in a difficult moment is a cut from the norm and everyone loves it. But in an online message board you have the problem that jokes are understood by everyone, whereas a deep insightful comment isn't understood by everyone, so jokes tend to go to the top, and people tend to cluster jokes on jokes in joke trees and suddenly what started as "a joke here and there lightens the mood up" turns into people trying to one-up each other on jokes instead of reading the damn article and sharing some actual insight. It's hard to control "how much" online. HN actually has lots of jokes in absolute numbers, usually only the best ones are tolerated, it's just that on a relative basis you won't enter a thread with 20 comments where 18 are jokes, which is what I would hate.