There are some ground rules that should be followed (in my opinion) for a ask* question to be decent: OP:
1) Topic should be a question only. Your answer can go in the responses. Others:
1) No puns
2) No joke responses
3) No top level responses that aren't direct answers to the questions. This would obviously have to be followed on a user by user basis. Note: Your mention @ mk failed because usernames are case sensitive. @MK@ (currently) does not work. It would have to be \@mk\@ (sans the backslashes).
I'm gonna go ahead and take issue to number 3. Look, a lot of people are having reactionary responses to the fact that funny content on Reddit tends to be flashy one-liners that are aggressively un-opinionated/related to the topic at hand. But that just means that those posts aren't funny to you any more. Humor is about benign violations or something else that people will figure out. If the violation is malicious, like moving the conversation in a direction which is unhelpful or even harmful, then it's not humor to you any more. One of the most important rules of comedy is respect. (It's not actually Tina Fey's rule, she didn't make it up, it's old as improv itself at least.) It's hard to see this sometimes, but often the difference between the most amazing comedians and the people who just have some mass appeal but will be forgotten before or as they die is that great comedians are not saying jokes. Great comedians are telling truths out of an understanding of a topic. Humor is funny. If I can make you laugh over the internet that's step 1 to being funny. But if I can make you laugh and be respectful to the question, that's all of the other steps. So let's not just say "The only answers are soopr serius answrs because we r supr serius." Because that's not thinking about humor. That's thinking about Reddit.
