[grzm]

In general, strive for substantive and constructive comments on HN. If you've got that, a little humor added in can be appreciated. Comments that are submitted only for humor value (which you knew yours was, given your parenthetical addendum) are likely to be less appreciated on HN than on other sites.

Here's a recent thread where this has been discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13760333

There are likely others that describe it better, but I don't have them at hand.

Edit to add: Of course there are. Here's some comments by 'dang on the topic:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20humor&sort=byPop...

[combatentropy]

So what I want to know is how the members of Hacker News act as one. Presumably these are the same people who appreciate humor on other sites, upvote it, and participate in it. But on Hacker News they somehow all know to downvote it. It's eerie.

[grzm]

I'm not sure I follow. People often behave differently depending on the context (e.g., work, home, school, out with friends), so acting differently on different sites doesn't seem very surprising. Also, different sites have different, though perhaps overlapping, populations, so the "average" behavior or culture is going to be different.

One example (mentioned in the HN guidelines) is Reddit. There are people who frequent both HN and Reddit, yet it's clear that members on HN—even those who use Reddit as well—don't want HN and Reddit to be the same. As such, they behave differently on each site. That's not to say one is better than any other: they're just different.

And HN members don't act as one—just as they don't act as one on any other site. If they did, your comment would have been downvoted to the point that it was flagged dead (given it's likely been seen by hundreds, if not thousands) or not flagged at all. Given it's current shade of gray, I suspect you've received only a few downvotes. (Edit to add: I see you did say it is at -2.)

Does that make sense? Or am I misreading you?

Anyway, this is quite off-topic now. I posted these in the hopes of providing a bit more insight into the HN community. I hope they've been more helpful than frustrating.

[combatentropy]

Thank you. No, you're not misreading me. I guess like you say, it could be worse than -2. (Although now it's at -3!)

I don't frequent Reddit. It sounds like it's so jocular that people come here to get away from it all.

[rimliu]

It's rather sad what set of behaviour is considered "professional".