Poe's law: there's nothing so ironic or sarcastic that someone hasn't actually argued for real somewhere. You just can't tell any more.
Besides being in text, HN has an international audience. It's really hard to make jokes land, and you usually need to include an explanation to avoid being downvoted.
Because, as this thread demonstrates, there's a lot of people with Opinions who will unironically push $language on any post that is not about $language, <_<.
I don't know, it seems that most here have been burnt-out of humour. To be fair to them, the burn-out is mainly caused by ignorant managers hearing "Node! React!" and forcing on the developers whether it makes sense or not.
There could be other reasons that it's downvoted, even if it's not taken "seriously". The fact that it's a low effort comment that has barely anything to do with the OP, that it's a rehashing of the same old "unpopular opinion" that's not really unpopular here, the fact that it takes a nice little post of a small utility and shifts the tone to something negative just because they have an axe to grind - all of these are other possible options people might downvote this oh-so-ironic comment.
Poe's law, ironic content can be hard to differentiate from non-ironic content, and a proliferation of ironic content will bring the quality of HN down.
