There's no value in a flame war, regardless of which side is the majority. Extremely heated subjects do not lead to positive results here or anywhere. The only way to win as a person is not to play the game despite the very strong temptation.

But to your point, if you can't convince someone of the value of your contribution then perhaps it just isn't valuable. Do you believe all opinions and expressions of those opinions are equally valuable and require equal advertisement?

> There's no value in a flame war, regardless of which side is the majority. Extremely heated subjects do not lead to positive results here or anywhere. The only way to win as a person is not to play the game despite the very strong temptation.

I agree, and the oblique War Games reference is appreciated.

> Do you believe all opinions and expressions of those opinions are equally valuable and require equal advertisement?

(Who would believe such a thing? Well, I guess there was the FCC Fairness Doctrine, but fortunately that's gone.)

Of course not all opinions are equally valuable, but an echo chamber of people parroting the party line also has no value. In fact, that has negative value to me; I'd prefer a cacophony of divergent opinions to a single narrative.

I'd just like to see the top 10 or 20 comments instead of the top single comment.

HN was not designed for topics getting 500 comments -- those comments are there you have to scroll/page to get to them. But I guarantee though that the replies to that top comment are mostly rebuttals; very few people reply to a comment to agree with it.

Are you sure you're arguing about something that's an actual real problem here?

> Of course, some people believe that the losers in any particular forum should be silenced, because the majority view must be correct.

.. that is, consensus, at least in that particular forum. But losers still shouldn't be silenced.