> People value opinions they agree with, not opinions that are new, different or insightful.

> It shows that people in general don't just respectfully disagree with differing opinions. People attack all opinions that aren't inline with theirs.

It's not just that. The achilles heel of HN's readership/voting behavior is its bias towards positivity and validation, and against criticism and sarcasm. I've got tons of fake internet points here, so I often do some experiments to test this out. As a general rule, with some exceptions: No matter what the topic is, if your comment is positive, shows approval or otherwise supportive of the topic, you'll tend to get upvotes. If you raise concerns, point out flaws, or express cynicism, you're going to get downvoted.

So when something comes up that's actually false or suspect, the correct skeptics get downvoted, and the incorrect people praising the article are promoted to the top. I wish I had access to the raw data to do a sentiment analysis on the comments and compare it to voting trends. I guarantee they are correlated!

Ironically, the first vote on this comment was down.

Yeah it is ironic. You didn't say or do anything out of line. Yet people are voting you down simply because they disagree. Imagine what happens in the real world let alone on the internet.

This is why I believe there should be no downvote at all. Or there should be a way to see which posts are the most controversial instead of hiding them. When someone disagrees with an opinion and downvotes it - they bury it and in a way hide it from the world. This behaviour is what creates echo chambers where only the popular opinions are amplified even if they are wrong.

I guess part of the problem is that our brains tend to use the authority of who says what to validate the opinion.

We need to switch our brains to focus on what is being said instead and a lot of people have a problem with this.

When there's no way to define the authority of who is saying it, the authority is transferred to the subject instead, in this case "Hacker News".

People will have a tendency to flock on the authority represented now by the subject.

(BTW, in my experience HN is the best place i know where "whats being said" is more important and have an authority on its own, and the reason why i keep coming back here)

>(BTW, in my experience HN is the best place i know where "whats being said" is more important and have an authority on its own, and the reason why i keep coming back here)

I agree. Still, even though it is the "best" it is still quite bad and this very article proves the point.

It should be scary, because since internet discussions often become less than argumentative. Instead of even lack of arguments, it becomes combative. People need some guiding principles, but with different streams of information and manipulators willingly misleading people, you end up with lowest common denominators setting untrue agendas. I guess this is what they mean by "digitalization", just that nobody know the consequences of what they say.

And no, I don't "fear" or am "frightened", as some using dominating speech would have it. There are real concerns in the world that need to be openly addressed, and people need to demand accountability and fairness for those issues.