> Sure, but it's different to say "people downvote humor" (which is mostly true) and "people have no sense of humor" (which is mostly an insult.) I think I have a sense of humor, but I downvote fluff jokey comments unless they're screamingly funny.

Which is a general policy that ensures you'll never see a joke here (screamingly funny or not). I don't think I know anybody who can produce jokes that fit your requirements at any rate even close to 100%. So I would assume, rather than risk it, why would somebody bother if some dude is just going to come by and downmod it anyways? The downvote surpresses the desire of people to even want to try.

I'm not saying that all jocularity is equal. Jokes about "your mom" probably deserve a downvote (and depending on the vulgarity maybe a flag). But somebody making a witty retort, while perhaps not deserving of praise should probably be left unmolested. I've heard more jokes at a convention of priests than I see regularly on HN.

Put another way, a downvote for a harmless comment is the real life equivalent of somebody making conversation with you, inserts a subtle attempt at humor, and you then proceed to glare at them, turn around and walk away. It's not helpful. But I do understand not wanting to respond back in a humorous way either, otherwise we end up with 4chan and all the irrelevant absurdity that comes with going that direction.

However, due to this kind of behavior we end up with a possible HN as it could be (which may be perfectly fine by you, I don't know), of stuffy pedantic and pretentious pseudo-conversationalists who'd rather police a message forum than actually contribute something useful or interesting (or gasp even marginally funny). Maybe that's the goal, I don't know. But it makes for boring reading and conversation.

> A good example is yesterday, there was a post that got a lot of upvotes before it died -- it was an image with a 6 by 6 matrix of programming languages, and each slot had a funny image macro-y picture showing how proponents of language X felt about language Y. I flagged that thread. (If it were a comment, I would downvote it.) Well, why did I do that? It wasn't terrible, although it was only a little bit funny.

You flagged that thread? Are you serious? I think that's outrageous!

I've seen this same image before, and I was crying laughing at it. It also could have spawned a useful discussion on perception of platform choice when building software. Customers can be users of software too, and in my experience, what language you use can positively or negatively impact perception of your product and company. The opportunity to have some interesting discourse on that topic is now dead.

> I did it because there are literally a million places on the internet where I can look at pictures that are a little bit funny, and only a handful of places where I can have a serious discussion about things that I am actually interested in.

But it wasn't a picture of LOLCATS or or a guy getting hit in the crotch with a frisbee or some such. It was at least marginally related, in theory, to the kinds of discussions we should be having on HN. I perfectly understand your desire to seek out interesting and relevant discussion to your particular areas of interest. If something doesn't fit your areas of interest, feel free to not participate, don't penalize us that do want to participate.

For example, I don't think a thread on R6RS is particularly interesting or useful to a startup-oriented tech discussion forum -- marginally used language discussions should be left on the language maintainer's own forum. But if I saw a topic on the front page about it, I'd leave it absolutely unmolested because somebody thought it was interesting enough to deserve upvotes and it has about the same theoretical relevancy to HN as did the image matrix of language choice perception.

> Based on my experience in other places online, it looks like a really, really, really slippery slope, so I err on the side of throwing out all fluff.

Yes, I absolutely agree with you. I can understand the continuous meta-discussion here about how to keep HN from sliding down the reddit->digg->4chan slope. But I think we have to be aware of, and meta-discuss how to keep HN from going the opposite direction, that of becoming so rarefied that any nonconforming comments are immediately stifled and the entire board dies except for a small group who enjoy spending their time in a self-selected echo chamber.