There was a joke. It was at least tangentially related to the article at hand. Then someone got offended and made the very first irrelevant comment here. He could have just let it slide, but no.
More irrelevant comments were made in response to the first irrelevant comment. Yours included. I really don't think people care to read about your opinion on what ruins the site here.
Does it really matter? Are we going to continue talking about this or just let the vote buttons do the talking?
I bet you don't want to just let my comment hang here and you'll want to say something else that is completely not relevant to the article, but you're going to have to in order to stop this madness!
That's the struggle that every HN commenter must deal with.
You're not supposed to talk about your downvote (or upvote) and just do the voting. If you can't downvote yet, just leave it up to someone who can. Another strategy is to upvote sibling comments so they go higher than the comment that you hate. If it's really irrelevant it will die. But it's difficult, as you can see. So that's where mods come in.
"Someone got offended" is the problem here. Not the alleged offender.