Sarcasm is a valuable tool in the human communication arsenal. If you want to do without it, be my guest, but don't try to dictate your subjective preferences to others who have what I would claim is a more mature and more healthy attitude towards the beauty and variety in human language.
And the "petty" is all in your head. There are too many people who blame others for what's in their own head.
Sarcasm can be very valuable. It can also be used to contemptuously insult someone when a simple rebuttal would suffice.
The latter is an immature, weak intellectual position (see Appeal to Ridicule and Question Begging Epithet) that says nothing more than "you are so wrong as to look asinine".
This only fosters more emotional, insult-riddled dialogue, which is why the user above quoted HN guidelines, which you are now impotently raging against. This is a pretty civil place, we like to keep it that way.
And the "petty" is all in your head. There are too many people who blame others for what's in their own head.