The way I see it. It&#x27;s not that the HN crowd don&#x27;t appreciate humour and memes, it&#x27;s that they don&#x27;t want HN to descend into a forum where every second comment is a reflexive wise-crack and&#x2F;or meme-vehicle. So that type of behaviour is actively policed against and newcomers think HNers are a dour bunch of so-and-so&#x27;s. Not so!<p>If I want to chuckle for a while I&#x27;ll head over to Reddit.<p>If I want to see what can happen to a forum when the intelligentsia leave I&#x27;ll head over to &#x2F;. for a while.<p>To remind myself of how bad things can get if we allow the lunatics take over the asylum I&#x27;ll read the comments in YouTube while I watch a video.<p>Though not a news site, comparable sites to HN in terms of comment quality are TheRegister and ArsTechnica though you&#x27;ll rarely get the level of detail in comments that one does on HN - the reason being (to go back to the point I made at the start of this comment) is that one does not fear that one&#x27;s voice will be drowned out by dross.