I'm wondering why my comment downmodded; I'd like to know in what way I may have violated community guidelines, so I don't again. I suppose my comment was not useful, is that it?
Your comment was off-topic, but given that this kind of a fluffy article I don't think that's a huge sin. Maybe people assumed you were making some kind of moon landing hoax statement?
Well, the quote was from the 404 page, but I can see how it could be seen as off-topic. In any case, it seems the situation has reversed now, so no point discussing this minor point.
Yes. Only you know why you hadn't seen the coverage of the lost Apollo tapes. So, your comment was about as useful to the conversation as, "where oh where did I put my car keys?"
If his question were taken literally, then that might be a good explanation. But it seems pretty obvious that he is asking why it isn't more widely known that something so important was lost.
Two potentially instructive responses might be "The lost Apollo 11 tapes have been all over the news and everyone except you knows about them" or "NASA only recently admitted this embarrassing fact and it was released on Sunday morning to minimize media coverage."
BTW, I didn't downvote until his comment was briefly at +2; it wasn't a bad comment, just a vague/rhetorical/possibly-paranoid comment I wouldn't want to encourage.
If he had clarified that he was wondering why it hadn't gotten more coverage, I would have pointed out I remembered a bunch of coverage a few years ago -- coverage that even yielded a Wikipedia article, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes>, with a 3+ year edit history.
Instead, he seemed genuinely interested in why someone would have disliked his comment, so I gave a likely answer.
