WTF? We've cut you an unbelievable amount of slack over the years but if you flout HN's rules this flagrantly, I don't know what you expect us to do. Do you want to be banned?
It was a joke, a parody of how often HN itself acts as a pleb filter, specifically about telling people to "go back to Reddit", and it got flagged... two days ago. Mea culpa for trying to be humorous in the no-humor zone.
The commentariat already punished me. The system worked as intended, I paid a misdemeanor fine of karma for a misdemeanor offense, and I made a number of better comments since, and we should all have moved on by now. This wasn't something you needed to step in on.
Karma in general is a poor metric of quality, and the way that downvotes are being gated from users not catering to popular opinion pushes out these voices that may not necessarily be fringe, but just unpopular at the time. This is a feedback loop, and only creates environments where people do not feel comfortable speaking out.
