> the vast majority of people here share the same interests

What are those interests that the vast majority of people here share?

HN is a self-selecting echo chamber for people who like the content that is posted to HN.

Ok well, you didn't answer the question, you just repeated something generic you've heard here, I guess. Whether it's true or not, who knows. I'm not sure what it means exactly. How would you go about testing whether that's actually true?

I dislike a fair percentage of the topics posted here regularly, or have no interest in them, and I suspect that's not uncommon. A survey on that subject would be fascinating.

I wouldn't say there is anything here that I personally 'dislike', stuff that doesn't interest me, sure, but then I just don't read about it. I don't feel the need to down vote it though.

That's the difference I think

That makes me wonder why you choose to stop by HN. Surely there are a large number of other tech-based feeds that would suit you better.

Pendatry:D

> On YouTube, it's much more likely to mean the latter, but it's the former that's actually useful.

What makes you say that? Why is the person that doesn't like cat juggling even clicking on the video?

Because Google steered users this way via their auto-play next video feature. I’ve avoided it like the plague it is so I’m not precisely sure where I saw it, but I’m absolutely sure there was language to the effect of “we pick the next videos automatically based on your likes and dislikes” which translates to “dislike means give me less of this” which means they’ve skewed the usefulness of the metric. It’s no longer clearly indicative of bad content, it’s now indicative of bad content or content users don’t want to see more out automatically.

This is an excellent point. A dislike value is a single number but represents a large variety of reasons, only some might relevant to if you would think the video is good, and you don't know the breakdown.