Thanks for your response. I think it's pretty obvious that my comment doesn't, and isn't intended to, apply to 100.000% of the commenting group.

I find your characterization of people who don't agree with you as somehow socially inept is childish, dismissive, and illogical.

Of course you do. This is fucking mob rule -- here's a group which disagrees violently with itself on the minutiae of silicon doping processes and whether or not to put a semicolon after Javascript statements. Yet on a story like this, where the few given facts easily support multiple valid interpretations, a cursory scan of the comments shows near unanimity in the common conclusion. A conclusion which enables the overwhelming majority of HNers to claim victimhood and persecution by outsiders.

So either:

1) a situation which, on the surface, would appear to be nuanced and require calm reasoning to process and fully understand is actually binary and easily decided, or

2) this story hits a pain point common to the psyche of this group of readers, who have common background and experience, work or have worked together, work at similar companies, attend the same events, and in general belong to the milieu.

To me it's rather obvious that #2 is the case, what do you think?

And assuming #2 is the case: given my experience in the past with subsets of this group, and other non-HNers who would nonetheless be described as part of the same culture, I feel that the hypothesis I put forward has the potential to be a theory with significant explanatory power. For some commenters.

Your false dichotomy is unappealing.

A third option (for starters) is that there are so many overreactions and mistakes in this story that there are many parties to be outraged with. The outrage isn't uniformly distributed across parties to blame but everybody feels it. This is how these threads get so long. If the community was not divided, these threads would be short simple affairs.

I don't know if we're reading the same threads then. I see a nearly unambiguous, unidirectional wave of resentment, and the downmodding of anyone expressing anything remotely dissenting. A normal HN dialogue has people showing restraint when downmodding, even on topics where there is heated disagreement and passionate opinion, say something like "Does PHP suck?"

This is a deluge of unanimity, by comparison.