I don't understand what's so bad about witty one liners, per se. I wish there was a better mechanism for filtering the types of cascades you mention as opposed to arbitrarily declaring one liners off limits. (Ie, have different _views_ into the same thread.) Seems there should be a way to have quality discussion _and_ the occasional bit of humor. Slashdot manages to do ok despite "+5 funny"...
Before /. got overrun with trolls and idiots, it used to be a nice combination of one-liners and honest-to-god interesting, information-dense material. I liked it that way.
In fact, if you could mix the jokes with the information density in just the right way, I think that would be a hugely popular site. People like laughing, and they like having jokes to share with the other hackers during the day.
