Part of it is also that HN is a bit of an echo chamber and unpopular opinions get cast aside very consistently

That does happen, but less often than you're claiming here. Most of the time, it's easy to see how a comment violated the site guidelines or otherwise attracted downvotes. But it is less obvious to readers who agree with the comment, leading to the sensation that their views get unfairly downvoted.

There's still an interesting connection to unpopular opinions though: it's harder to express a contrarian view neutrally. Probably much harder actually.

I rather often see comments, which are well reasoned and argued downvoted for (quite obviously) no good reasons at all, except for communicating an opinion, which seems unpopular to the downvoters.

You most often see that on anything Tesla, Google, or Apple or for opinions going against the libertarian grain (granted, you sometimes see the opposite happening too on political and economic issues)

That said, I will steadfastly refuse to further comment on such downvotes since it's not only counterproductive (and against the guidelines), but that I feel the downvoter is actually debases his, or herself.

In the end it's anyway auto-correcting. I upvote comments, which I don't think deserve an upvote by itself, but that I feel are unfairly downvoted.

Thanks to the moderators, btw, who overall do I fine job of keeping the discussions lively and relevant.

HN's commenting system is fundamentally broken. there is almost zero correlation between net upvotes and insight

As anecdotal proof, I recently got upvoted 13 points for saying "I thought some of his suggestions were pretty decent. But then he just threw everything away by mucking around in the Code, I mean Overview tab. His last design, without the guiding lines, make it look like jumbled shit pie."

Not only had this same thing been said multiple times already, but I said it less well and was vulgar. I wouldn't have upvoted me Its not that I disagree with what I said, but I could have made more thoughtful. I could have done a point by point critique, showing what I thought he did right and why, and what he did wrong and why. But I didn't. I was lazy, and I said it in a way that got upvotes.

On the other hand I've spent time, up to an hour, writing careful precise comments and gotten not a single upvote, maybe some downvotes.

So, in my view, HN has a feedback mechanism that rewards trite, thoughtless, vulgar commentary. And as folks here ought to know, if you want to increase the frequency of a behavior, you reward it, and if you want to decrease the frequency of a behavior you fail to reward it.

To close, I will say one thing that HN has in its favor: trolls, goons, and jerks tend to get shut down quickly, and that's great.

Yes, indignation and snark get upvoted. That's a flaw of the voting system, so we can't live by upvotes alone. I doubt that it's specific to HN. To me it seems like humans in general.

Yep. You say something that is not in the mainstream, and your comment gets flagged, and your account gets banned for being "incendiary".

I disagree with that, I have had expressed 'extreme' opinions in this forum but I kept it civil, positive, and all I got hit with was to lose some 'karma points', and even the comments 'slapping me' were positive and I learned from the dialogue.

I am not perfect, but who is?

I believe in this forum we value open mindness and a fair dialogue. I don't like agreeing with everyone on everything, that would make a very boring and unproductive forum.

Define "extreme". Try expressing ideas that are anti-egalitarian or anti-democratic and see how far you can go.

Lots of people are anti democratic. Democracy is pretty bad. Look at the state of the world. But there’s a difference between being anti-democratic and pushing a clearly even worse government design as if it has observably more merit.

For those you might need to define and defend your stance a bit more carefully. but is that really unfair?

No. I've never been banned for being incendiary and I use the comment section almost exclusively to criticize things, including this comment which I now feel compelled to disagree with given that my experience contradicts it.