Some of us made LOLcat jokes because the story is old news. Maybe they weren't funny to you -- if so, mea culpa.
The danger of demonizing bad jokes is that eventually, nobody will make any jokes at all; they can't all be funny. Then we're just a bunch of annoyingly high-strung geeks being Very Serious about matters which have absolutely no relevance.
I think Slashdot's and Reddit's problems run deeper than one-liners. /. has some features I think would be interesting to add to HN (meta-moderation is a very interesting concept), while HN has some interesting things /. would stand a lot to gain if implemented (the idea editors shot down stories rather than post them).
Whatever Slashdot's problems, they're still the gold standard in moderation systems, and something about that site seems to encourage long form comments- something I often miss here.
The danger of demonizing bad jokes is that eventually, nobody will make any jokes at all; they can't all be funny. Then we're just a bunch of annoyingly high-strung geeks being Very Serious about matters which have absolutely no relevance.