Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for enlightening me re: censorship of posts. The first version of my post included a paragraph raising the issue of censorship (since I could not find my comment with a page search). So I thought the -1 was hiding my comment Then I found the "More" button, and discovered my comment... at the very bottom. So I deleted that paragraph, so I wouldn't create a red herring of my own... and to be fair to HN. However,…
I grew suspicious after my bug report comment was ignored in favour of one with less content, so I logged out and refreshed the page - there was no comment. A friend also viewed the page and again, no comment. Another thing that HN does is slow down your page loads if you have negative karma. Pages can often take between 10-30 seconds to load.
I was trying to figure out what the "avg:" was in profiles. Then I compared a couple, and one bully (bullying someone else this time) had modest avg: while the victim had very high average, but bully has very high "karma" --- which seemed counter-intuitive. Low value posts but high karma? So I wasn't sure what "avg:" was if not post points.
But I believe it is post points. So, for high "karma," bully must post a LOT, but his posts are not well received (even though high "karma" would suggest otherwise). So (guessing) "karma" seems more about quantity (than quality) in bully cases.
Then, since I have negative "karma", I got curious about my own "avg:" since I didn't realize I had one. So I checked.
Apparently when your "karma" is negative, you have no "avg." :-) YC/HN just leaves the value blank. So I am holding steady at -19 YC/HN "karma" and have no "avg: [this space intentionally left blank by YC/HN]"
:-)