That is indeed the joke. Hopefully you don't get downvoted for asking a question.

It was a very well veiled one too. If not for your comment I would not have realized it. I suspect people downvoting it didn't get it either.

I think it would be much better if people focused downvoting on comments that go against HN guidelines rather than questions or comments they disagree with.

No, if a comment is against guidelines you are supposed to flag it.

How would you propose a method of limiting the downvoting of comments that are salient and relevant but otherwise elicit a knee-jerk emotionally disagreeable response? Or do you consider that ability a feature? It seems to me to erode curious debate.

Not sure I understood your question, but you can't really control what others will do. E.g. people can downvote or flag without any reason whatsoever.

The question relates to how can you create a system that helps align peoples incentives with the goal of the forum.

Imagine if you could allow users to delete comments they don’t agree with. That would create the antithesis of a curious discussion, so that feature isn’t available. So, yes, a good system can constrain what users are allowed to do with intelligent guardrails.

Some folks forget that not everyone is "terminally online" and won't get every reference and idiom.

This is just something you might learn during history lessons in school, no online-ness is needed.

I don't mean to kill the joke further but I think Hitler was already a dead man walking before Hitler killed Hitler, so I think his enemies (Allied Forces plus Russians) deserve most of the credit.

The Soviet Union was part of the allied forces.

I don't mean to kill the joke but I think Hitler was already dead before Hitler killed Hitler, so I think his enemies (Allied Forces plus Russians) deserve most of the credit.