The fact that this parent comment is clearly up-voted and this comment is "greyed out" is emblematic of what I personally think is wrong with HN commenting. The above comment is not helpful, productive, and is unnecessarily negative in tone. The below comment is unhelpful, unproductive, and playful and (if anything) positive in tone. We can't have playful comments but we can have useless negative comments?

I stopped posting after one of my playful comments was down voted. That is a real affect of down votes.

We can't have either.

The subject of the thread is playful, unhelpful, and unproductive

I agree my comment is useless but is it really negative? I'm not bashing anyones work. Just making a comment satirical of the fact that a lot of open source projects turn in to commercial, VC backed companies.

Comparing this project to real open source projects with VC backed parent companies is negative, yes. The implication is that investment in those companies is as frivolous as this project at least appears to be.