Way to spoil the lighthearted mood of a fun oscilloscope simulation... I've noticed, and dislike how unwelcome it is to make a simple acknowledgement or agreement on HN. Must be something about the voting system.
It's because it doesn't really contribute anything, and some people are stricter about that than others. The easiest way to turn that simple acknowledgement with downvotes into a neutral or upvoted comment is to just add a simple sentence with your own thoughts, or what it reminds you of, or anything that actually justifies the use of a comment instead of just the upvote button.
It's just one of the ways HN is slightly different than other forums, and while it sometimes comes across as negative, I think overall it encourages better comments.
I can sort of understand the "this is not a chat room" attitude only leave constructive comments or whatever. But sometimes you want to just leave something more than a button click because there was more resonance than is expressed in a binary "yes", yet you don't necessarily have anything insightful to add.
Anyway... that is my opinion, but I expect it's unpopular and will not be surprised if more downvotes come hurtling my way.
I think the disconnect is believing it has to be insightful. There's a large area there where you can work within to make a comment more signal than noise. Just explaining why you agree is usually sufficient.
Some forums are perfectly fine without a distinction of contribution, such as reddit. Others, such as here, have a culture that tries to promote more substantive comments. Neither is better than the other, but both excel at specific things. If I want reddit style comments (and I do, often), I'll visit reddit. If I want HN style comments, I visit HN. Forcing redditors to be more serious or HN users to be less serious doesnt serve either community well, and would likely cause both to be similar and mediocre compared to what they were before.
The whole point is that this is a place where someone can dive deep on the differences in etiquette and culture between reddit and HN and not worry too much about being called out for being too serious or cramping other people's good time, because some people find a discussion like that a good time even if they also like 10+ comment chains of jokes and crowd sourced movie quotes at other times.
For that reason, I don't really expect you to get downvoted. You explained and justified your position, which I find is usually all most people here really expect as a minimum.
