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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

It does not indicate a bad actor. It is bad actor. Attribution is not a "wish" of the original creator that you should feel morally obliged to follow. It is a legal prerequisite of you being allowed to make a fork of it for free, under the licence given by the author.

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I think you read too far into “indicate,” since I agree with everything you’ve said. I was only trying to emphasize that it’s my observation.

It’d be helpful for anyone downvoting this to point out the factual error that I can’t see.

It's downvoted because it's a semantic nitpick based on a misunderstanding; it doesn't have enough meaning to contain a "factual error".

If it's just a misunderstanding, why try to punish him with the karma hit? That's just bullying, imho.

I don’t think this particular comment deserves any downvotes (and I didn’t downvote either it or its parent), but remarking on a comment’s vote status on HN is a general faux pas.

I am aware that complaining about your own downvotes is against the site rules. That is not what's going on here.

Instead, danw1979 was asking for someone to explain why a reasonable comment was getting downvoted into oblivion. Neither danw1979 nor lmilcin did anything to deserve the random dogpile they received.

The guideline is about discussing upvotes/downvotes in any comment, not just your own:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

AFAIK, there’s no actual site rule about this. It’s just a faux pas in general, whether it’s your downvotes or someone else’s.

We’re on the same page about them not deserving it.

From the guidelines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The comment provides negative value, noise with insufficient signal. Getting such comments out of the way is exactly what downvotes are for, regardless of whether the intent was malicious.

And effectively censorship since such a comment will end up as the last child of its parent and with a text-color barely darker than the page background. Or hidden entirely if a couple people hit "flag" instead since "showdead" is opt-in.

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