This thread has brought to the front of my mind something that annoys me personally. It also seems that this isn't entirely isolated to me. To preface this I'm not against joking around and being not serious. Hell this entire place is pretty much based around it. I also understand that humor and non-seriousness is a large part of the persona of many people around here. The thing I want to suggest/ask about here is some sort of sanction for someone to say "This use of humor offends me". I just get the feeling that there is a prevailing attitude that it is wrong to be offended by the "lovable" antics of some of our more colorful members. This can be particularly frustrating when the humor being used is only distinguishable from an actual serious argument based on the person that posted it.
Perhaps I'm in the minority here but I don't always appreciate the way some threads go. At the same time I'm afraid to say anything for fear of getting a "The internet is serious business" type of response. At which point I'm basically unable to participate in a thread because I'm not interested in the current tone of the arguments and any attempt to be a little more serious is met with what is essentially ridicule. Obviously some threads are for nothing but humor and have no business being serious. On the other hand we get our fair share of threads where hyperbole is used to emphasis (sometimes mild) dislike of something in place of actual criticism. Then when someone attempts a more serious line of discussion about this expressed dislike we end up back at "the internet is serious business" which seems slightly unfair. I feel it should be possible for the humorous, the serious, and humorously serious lines of conversation to coexist in a thread. The problem is that attempts at that often lead to someone becoming a pariah. (This probably also happens occasionally when people attempt to inject humor into a thread that was obviously serious.) Sure on option is to start a "totally serious" thread that parallels the topic of the less serious thread. However, that seems unnecessarily complicated and messy.
I guess the TL;DR version of this is that sometimes it seems like we let people get away with annoying other people because it's generally funny and I'm not sure that is fair to the person being annoyed. Maybe there is no good solution to this. I just think that it is worth being aware that this does seem to happen and is a potential source of drama.
P.S. I realize there is a serious tag. I'm just not sure when applied to a post that it is always respected. I'm also not sure it isn't occasionally used for hyperbole.