The effort is worthwhile.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16928482
There’s a recurring pattern: people ask you to back up what you say, and then you respond with “I won’t do that.”
If you make a controversial claim backed up by sources, you will get negative reactions from people who doubt the validity of those sources. If you make a controversial claim and refuse to provide sources because people would doubt their validity, you'll get negative reactions even from someone who might have agreed with you, because that's just rude.
One potential strategy might be to slowly ease your way towards your controversial conclusions, building up your argument carefully along the way, in a way that will make sense to your audience.
And yet you still may get downvotes. Such is life.
Lastly, it's very valuable to always be open to the idea that you are the one who is actually mistaken in some critical way.
I can see where this is going though.
Groupthink is stronk on HN. (Intentional typo, I just like the word "stronk" for some reason. /grin)