I must've pissed someone off at HN
You didn&#x27;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&#x27;s the only thing that happened, and it wouldn&#x27;t have affected your karma in any way. The only thing that makes karma go down is downvoting on comments. (Submissions don&#x27;t have downvoting, only flags, and flags don&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36762833">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;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.