Please don't comment on HN like you would on Reddit. If you don't have questions or information to add to the thread, you should probably use that as a cue to refrain from posting.
Joke posts might not seem bad, but in aggregate they lower the signal to noise ratio we have come to appreciate about HN. Additionally, once these kinds of jocular posts start, it becomes infectious.
I'm not trying to be mean; I'm guilty of making posts like this too. Many of us simply do not want to see HN devolve into the equivalent of a spammy subreddit. It's important that we all remind each other of the value of this community so that we can protect it from spiraling into a bad state.
It's important to remember that Hacker News is not a democracy. There isn't a voting system so people can democratically decide what content is good or bad. Rather, Hacker News is a dictatorship, controlled by Paul Graham and the Y Combinator. Within this space, the Y Combinator has absolute control over all content.
In a democratic system like Reddit, there might be objections to changing the titles or shadowbanning trolls (reddit does shadowban, but mods can't shadowban people for disturbing the quality of a subreddit). On Hacker News, these features are welcomed because they raise the quality of discourse.
Your only choice when it comes to hacker news is to stay and be a productive member, or leave. You are free to leave. Nobody is forcing you to stay here. The source code for Hacker News is even publicly available; if you want to make Joker News you're free to do so.
In this way, Hacker News circumvents tyranny of the majority in favor of quality of content. (I suspect that it also has to do with the Y Combinator's libertarian politics -- Hacker News is an excellent example of what the world could be like it if were organized into voluntary units with absolute internal control, but free choice and movement between those units.)
