If my comment does not add positively to a discussion, I don't hit submit. Comments with no content but just memes, sarcasm, meta-jokes, or in-references are rarely upvoted on HN. Depending on the your point-of-view, QE2's comment didn't meet one or more of the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
* Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
* Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
* Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.
I click the comments link to read useful, insightful, and critical things that others would like to add to the topic. Sarcasm in most cases doesn't fit the bill for me.
Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in kind to jokes. They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink. Victorian prudishness, for example, seems to have been defeated mainly by treating it as a joke. Likewise its reincarnation as political correctness. "I am glad that I managed to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote, "but looking back I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the situation deserved."
Hacker News is not as consistent as you think it is: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1932278 (Pure sarcasm, no content, 16 upvotes. That was actually a bit of an experiment on my part. I wouldn’t have expected to receive any upvotes.)
* Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
* Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.
* Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.
I click the comments link to read useful, insightful, and critical things that others would like to add to the topic. Sarcasm in most cases doesn't fit the bill for me.