ngl I'm pretty proud of you peoples. Nobody became upset or aggressive just because somebody said something that's not great to say if you actually wanted to be promoted, you still acted maturely. Good Stuff!
I think people took it seriously because we often get a lot of people coming onto here writing an essay about why they need to be admin, or complaining about why they haven't been chosen to move up yet. It would probably be taken less seriously if it wasn't a super common occurrence