C'mon, that's disingenuous. I don't want the top comments to be middlebrow dismissals or lectures about jokes or jokes themselves. The irony is that your comment to this effect is itself a shallow dismissal.

> HN tends to be little better than Reddit at either.

I assure you, you are wrong in this. There are times when I see HN threads devolve into Reddit-land, but it's fairly rare, and very noticeable when it happens, because it reminds me why I generally don't bother with Reddit, but am (mostly) happy here on HN.