Absolutely agreed - and this goes for the voting system as well. I don't necessarily care about up-modding a submission or comment; I do so to try and help out and keep discussions clean and at least somewhat intelligent. If there was some intelligent way to filter submissions or comments without user input, then I wouldn't mourn the loss of "democracy" in the system at all.

Oh, and from the post - snarky comments and memes are definitely becoming a problem on HN. They add nothing to a discussion, are not insightful in any way, and do not express anything except the author's ability to regurgitate old jokes. They need to stop.