People have been complaining about HN turning into Reddit for at least 10 years. In fact, the HN guidelines used to ask people not to complain about HN turning into Reddit ("it's a semi-noob illusion"). But when we augmented the guidelines a year or so ago, we took out that one to preserve brevity.
The mods discourage humor because it tends to metastasize into tedious offtopic threads, which I guess is true enough.
Readers think they punish bad jokes and reward good ones, but the stupid Butts pun is doing great while the absurdist gem about Leonard Nimoy secretly wanting to be Kirk and living it out for a year in the white pages (and then someone working with him forgetting his name!) was nuked from orbit.
