The way people choose to use feedback on HN never fails to suprise me - we've got a generally intelligent user base here, but the most common type of feedback voting isn't because something is wrong but rather a childish "I don't like it - I want to suppress this comment".

In this case it's something different - this was an honest question, and received two useful replies, so why downvote?! The mental model of people using Kafka is useful to know - in this case the published data being more log-like than stream-like since it's retained per a TTL policy, with each "subscriber" having their own controllable read index.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments