[insteadof]

No one's complaining about the lack of cat photos and memegenerator links on Hacker News, but here we are again decrying Stack Overflow trying to keep its signal to noise ratio high.

The historical lock is an appeasement for those who like to binge on candy all day long and not realise a site built on 90% candy is no place for quality.

You're laying bets all over the place. How about putting forth a cogent argument why these type of questions need to reside on Stack Overflow and not on reddit or Hacker News?

[m_myers]

Well put. There is actually a major difference between a joke thread here and a joke thread on Stack Overflow: on HN, it would be on the front page for a few hours or perhaps a day at most (less if the volume of comments triggered the anti-flamewar code). But on Stack Overflow, the joke thread was being bumped to the front page every day for months; any edit or new answer jumps it to the top again, even if that answer is a copy of six other answers.