He knows you were joking. It's a bad joke. "It's a joke" is not a magic bullet that means you can do no wrong.
Poisonous ideas spread as jokes. That is one of the ways they spread. A person thinking well about the issue wouldn't find the joke funny because it doesn't make sense. The joke relies on some poisonous, bad thinking to be understood. It has bad assumptions, and a bad way of looking at the world, built in.
Let me explain to you why it is a funny joke. It is funny because it involves Amazon undertaking massive technical measures, with huge reputational damage in order to try to kill a story which is primarily not spreading via Amazon-hosted sites anyway.
It's akin to a man with athlete's foot deciding to remedy it by discharging a shotgun into his leg.
It's easy to understand shooting a leg with a shotgun. That's a simple thing.
The Amazon thing in question is far more complicated, and far harder to understand.
Thinking they are "akin" is a mistake. It shows you're thinking about it wrong and failing to recognize how completely different they are.
One isn't going to confuse anyone or be misunderstood, the other will confuse most of the population and be misunderstood by most people.
One, if someone misunderstood, only involves one individual being an idiot. The other involves a large company being evil and thus can help feed conspiracy theories.
I'm not sure if you are aware of the difficulty of Amazon doing this. Suppose Jeff Bezos wants to do it. He can't simply order people to do it because they will refuse and leak it to the media and he'll look really bad and then he'll definitely have to make sure to try super hard for there to be no outages anytime soon.
Shooting yourself in the foot is stupid but easy. Doing this is stupid and essentially impossible. To think it's possible requires thinking that Amazon has a culture of unthinking obedience, or has an evil culture that all new hires are told about and don't leak to the media. Totally different.
Casually talking about impossible, evil conspiracies by big business, as if they are even possible, is a serious slander against those businesses, capitalism, and logic. Slandering a bunch of really good things -- especially ones that approximately 50% of US voters want to harm -- and then saying "it's just a joke, it's funny" is bad.
Casually joking about impossible, evil conspiracies by big business on the other hand is something completely different and also funny.
No one will believe its related and its certainly not slander to joke about it. Also you might want to leave the political opinions out of hacker news... there is no 50% of US who dislikes those things, they only have different ideas about how to support it.
Poisonous ideas spread as jokes. That is one of the ways they spread. A person thinking well about the issue wouldn't find the joke funny because it doesn't make sense. The joke relies on some poisonous, bad thinking to be understood. It has bad assumptions, and a bad way of looking at the world, built in.