We vote on things that are interesting to discuss, not to indicate there's any validity to the article. If non-discussion-participants are relying on the voting mechanism to provide "accurate tech news", they've only got themselves to blame for the "huge potential for misinformation".
People should be upvoting articles based on quality, not headline-bait or baseless rants (no data of bugs, no logs, etc) or rants where the person is oblivious (locks are in the docs).
Unfortunately, I can't downvote links. Like other sites, I can only ignore it for so long before it's drowned in noise (lack of interesting quality links).
I don't really understand your position or complaint - are you suggesting that the anonymous nature of the source is sufficient to disqualify it outright? Who determines 'baselessness', isn't that a consensus process? Are you commenting on a general feeling that HN promotes a lower number of quality links then "in the earlier days"?
Yeah, but by what measure of "quality"?
I don't hang around here with the intention of curating non-participating readers news feeds, I keep coming back for the interestingness of the discussions that result from submitted links. The true or falseness of the linked article is way less important (to me) than the opportunity for interesting comments.
('course, maybe _I'm_ doing it wrong...)
They are nice for getting hints on what's going on, but it's stupid to plainly believe stuff - like everywhere.
It's the same with cyber mobbing and posting random stuff about or even impersonating another person. If people wouldn't simply believe all the nonsense, be it FUD, advertisement or whatever a lot of things would be better.
This also seems to be a problem in the scientific field. Things sadly aren't transparent all the time. There are secrets and press releases that are made for investors. On the other hand there appear to be fewer peer reviews. Maybe because it's hard to make money doing so (especially when there is a lack of transparency in first place). If you want to discredit you competition it's far more effective to create FUD than it is to find (probably hidden) errors. Investors, consumers and even the media is unlikely to be interested into actual, scientific data that weaken or even disprove claims.
There's a lot disappointing about it. HN, like it or not, has gotten to a point where many people use it for tech news and don't read comments. When a story makes it to the top of HN, it gets tweeted to an audience of about 40K people - who generally don't see the comments at all. (links go straight to stories, not to the HN site.)
So there's a huge potential for misinformation when a piece like this makes it to the front page at all.
The peer review worked, but in my opinion a better system wouldn't even put this in front of a large enough audience to matter. It was an anonymous pastebin - it's not like this was debunking something on CNet or RWW that would have been widely seen anyway.