Maybe but my experience on HN is that there’s sometimes a mentality of “fools never differ” on here. I’ve seen countless correct and/or experienced commenters get downvoted even when the comment is well written.

It’s also worth remembering that five people is still only a very small subset of the hundreds that would have read the comment and did understand/agree but didn’t bother to comment for fear of the wrath of those who have already expressed disagreement. For example I was actually voted up several times before the others commented (as well as a few times since).

So it’s really not worth blaming individuals for the comments of others. The only possible outcome from that is starting another, much stupider, argument.