Their criticism was accurate and well intentioned. Getting downvoted not for the content but perhaps poor phrasing is perfectly normal. Complaining at all about the votes your internet comment gets is asinine.
It's not asinine to complain that for no good reason a perfectly good technical reference written for the benefit of all readers was being grayed out (at the time) via downvotes. It took a non-zero amount of work to dig up where the setting is documented, and I didn't do it for my own benefit.
This isn't taking it personally like I value HN karma. This is complaining purely because downvotes can make content invisible.
Your original comment amounted to "It's working as documented, see here and here". But arguably the question was "Why does it work in this baffling way?"
Certainly that's how I interpreted it -- and while I didn't downvote your answer explaining that this weird footgun is actually documented behaviour, I got no value from either that information or your tone, which read to me as a little dismissive ("It's pretty clearly documented [, you lazy/incompetent person who didn't bother to look this up yourself]").
> Getting downvoted not for the content but perhaps poor phrasing is perfectly normal
IMHO, good and relevant content beats poor phrasing (which again IMHO I didn't witness in the original post), especially since English is not the first language for many people on this board. Downvoting only disincentivizes posting and unfortunately the HN voting system doesn't indicate why, leaving one just to guess.
