>> They did get downvoted pretty quickly, but I was still surprised by them appearing in the first place.
> Apparently many people feel like this is not enough, but what more can be done?
I don't think much more can be done. On a public forum where literally anyone can make an account and post, there's no way to control what content appears, and you can't accurately assess the community by that. The tail of the internet is long, and the bottom of the barrel is deep.
You have to assess the community by how its immune system reacts. It has to be enough if, after a while, the worst comments are downvoted and/or flagged. Unfortunately "after a while" takes time, perhaps several hours, and in the meantime many readers encounter the worst shit before the immune system has gotten to it. Some of those readers are shocked—understandably, because it's shocking shit. Some of them don't understand the dynamics well enough to read the situation accurately—they just think "OMG Hacker News said $SHIT". And some of those take to Twitter and post shocking things, and another scandal cycle repeats. At this point there have been so many scandal cycles that I can at least say that it's second-order trauma to run into them. They used to upset me for days.
If you stop and think about it, it's clear that this is the price for hosting a public forum—there's no way to avoid the shit. The best we can hope for is an ever-improving immune system. HN's immune system—consisting of the community, software, and moderation—at least functions reasonably well, and there's room for it to get better.
It's easy to forget the good side of having a public forum: anyone can show up to post, regardless of who they are or who they know. If they have something interesting to say, they automatically and instantly belong. This is precious. It's how we get magical threads like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676862 (still on the front page), where the founder of a beloved publisher gets to talk to his devoted fans 20 years later.
I don't know if you guys remember, but 6 years ago, just before he handed over HN to us, pg implemented a feature called "pending comments" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304) in which comments were all placed into a queue to be approved of before they would appear in the threads. This is a technical solution that would actually work to prevent the worst shit from appearing here. But it sparked a huge firestorm and the first thing that I did on taking over HN was to roll that back. It was clear that the community didn't want it (not so surprising) but also the social critics of HN, the kind who write articles like the OP or post critiques of HN on Twitter, felt that it was elitist and would put too much power in the hands of entrenched users.