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Comment by tux3 | Hacker News Reader

People here downvote what they don't like

That's only true in the first hour or two or a comment's existence. If you wait until most active HNers have had a chance to weigh in, it's almost always only the content-free, Reddit-style (eg., "that's true!") or blatantly offensive comments that are downvoted below 0.

I'm well aware of that, the question is why don't they? I found it a neat aspect that an long-lived bug with a long-lived PR is in a long-lived VCS.

You're single line comment might have appeared dismissive of the version control used by the OpenBSD people, especially because it's something that often comes up in threads about BSD.

Threads involving OpenBSD can involve fierce downvoting so it's probably a good idea to be clear about what you're saying.

I think all of this could be easily avoided if HN stopped allowing people to try and silence valid comments that they happen to disagree with.

The site is now more political than ever and this just seems to fuel the "silence what you don't agree with" type voting, which I don't think is a good thing.

Topic aside, the original comment was ambiguous. Is it a middlebrow dismissal ("Pfft, their VCS is two dozen years old ..."), or is it an expression of admiration ("Wow, it's pretty amazing that their version control system has stood the test of time, even when the rest of the world seems to be moving towards git!")?

The pythonic tendency towards being explicit about what we mean to say serves us well even in prose. :-) I agree with the OP, it's a pretty neat engineering feat. I think the downvotes would likely have been avoided had that admiration been more clearly stated.

or what they consider irrelevant or noise.

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