I posted a link to an article about [1]Ford trucks a few hours ago and made a comment on that post basically saying I thought Ford was out of touch with farmers who live near me.<p>The post was bumped to the front page before I submitted my comment. I checked the comments about an hour later and the post was still there and had 27 points and my comment got 8 points.<p>The odd part is when I check it about an hour later my HN "Karma" fell from 4997 to 4811, and the post got buried down to #650 and the points were unchanged.<p>I don't know how "Karma" or rankings works here, but that seems a bit odd.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36762673">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36762673</a>
You didn't piss anyone off at HN. The post set off the flamewar detector, which is a software penalty that causes a thread to fall in rank when the discussion is overheated. That's the only thing that happened, and it wouldn't have affected your karma in any way. The only thing that makes karma go down is downvoting on comments. (Submissions don't have downvoting, only flags, and flags don't affect karma.)<p>I checked the logs and your karma has never been 4997. The most it has ever been is 4812. It went to 4811 after someone downvoted <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36762833">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36762833</a>.<p>Your karma was 4797 when you submitted the post, though—most likely you misremembered 4797 as 4997, which is an easy enough mistake to make.
The submission has a lot more comments than points which makes it automatically get "buried" (removed from the top posts) because it indicates potential fighting in the comments.<p>Re the karma, I don't belive it's possible for it to go down like that, you may want to email HN to ask them what's going on.
What's the big deal? I'm sure this happens a lot. You're not the first, you won't be the last. Move on.<p>As another commenter pointed out <i>the sooner you stop caring about invisible internet points the better</i>.
Perhaps your post getting flagged counts as negative karma too?<p>Anyway, karma discussions are generally off topic here so you may experience similar effect with this post.