Reading the article is pure folly! They'll steal your IP address, inject silly JavaScript into your hypertext markup interpreter, render their text in unpleasing typefaces and suboptimal contrast, hold you ransom with cookie popups or paywalls... One must protect oneself. The only way to safely interact with the world wide web (called "web" because it's a trap like a spider web!) is to gleen what you can 2nd hand, from the hackernews comments.
Joking around tends to earn downvotes, and that's okay --preferable, even. Your approach is quite common, I think. I very often look at comments first, too, depending on the topic & source. The only time skipping the article is any kind of issue is when people start engaging in the comments without proper context.
I do this sometimes, usually when the topic seems interesting, but I'm not familiar with it, so I don't know if it's worth spending time reading the whole article. By voting up, I hope that it will remain on the home page longer, so that people will notice it and comment on it. Then, if many people comment and if the comments look interesting, I might read the main article.
I have news for you! People here comment on articles they didn't read. All the time.