I've noticed the same. Usually it takes the form of dumb phrase-like jokes, retorts, puns, etc, with the entire chain being downvoted and flagged. This is necessary to keep HN from devolving into thoughtless meme-style posts that just clutter the space.
I get the notion of not allowing it to devolve, however I do think it should be OK and acceptable to upvote someone for truly making a humorous or clever comment. I work with a lot of clever people in my job, and humor (even bad humor) is part of our daily camaraderie and social interaction, so in some ways it's second nature for me to want to post humorous comments.
Not to over complicate the comment system here but I wish one could just tag a comment as "humor" and one could then choose to just not show them if one did not care to see such things.
The distinctive thing about the type of reddit humor I think they're talking about is how referential it is. You don't so much make a clever joke as invoke the standard joke on its trigger phrase or subject.
I see plenty of jokes on HN but they are usually part of a comment that would be made anyway. Joke-only comments also aren't that rare and when they're clever and specific to the context are usually pretty well received.
Glad it's not just me. I've seen many people complain about the reduced quality of discord on HN for years and years, and never noticed it myself. Last few months I keep running into very low effort comments, to the point that this notion has really started to become impossible to ignore.
I've been using both HN and Reddit roughly equally since 2013. A few months ago I started noticing a higher incidence of joke comments here at HN. Fortunately they seem to get down voted quickly.
