Jokes on HN are strongly discouraged. As much as people like them, their presence creates a feedback loop that drives the noise-to-signal ratio through the roof

Jokes on HN are strongly discouraged. As much as people like them, their presence creates a feedback loop that drives the noise-to-signal ratio through the roof. Jokes can be made, understood and voted up very quickly. In a democratic situation like HN, this leads to a large volume of replies and up votes that quickly drowns out all relevant conversation. The more threads that feature jokes, the harder it becomes to discourage them in the future. It seems the fate of all vote-based forums to eventually devolve into a sea of memes (HN -> Reddit -> Digg). HN's anti-humor downvote brigade gets a lot of pushback, but they are so harsh because they are doing their best to hold back that tide.