I don't know, whenever the topic of Kim Dotcom/Megaupload comes up people on hackernews act like he has done nothing wrong and is a victim. Now the community is against a business being built on uploading stolen content by anonymous users?
Ok.
Of course he has done wrong, but the fact why people are standing up for him is he did not do it while being in the US. It is one thing if the US asks for extradition of a criminal who committed the crime in the US, but an entirely different thing if the criminal committed the crime in another country - and that doesn't even answer the question if what the criminal did is actually a crime in that country.
It's already a legal stretch to arrest and punish pedophiles who fly out to Asia to rape children (because enforcing the laws against child rape should be something for the destination countries!), but the Dotcom and Assange sagas should not result in extradition.
Probably one of the only ones that actually will be positive in intent.
That being said, it seems WikiLeaks was at least complicit in Russia propaganda operations. And we have no way to tell whether that would have happened without the arrest. Complicated story. And still a trial I hate to see, if Assange gets convicted, there is no way to be sure that doesn't happen to other journalists as well.
dang made a good post about this recently. I'm having a hard time finding it now (he posts a lot), so I'll just paraphrase. a lot of (sometimes vile) positions are strongly advocated for by a minority of users, but only weakly opposed by the majority. that vocal minority will upvote any friendly post, while the majority will just shake their heads but not necessarily downvote every single post.
so it's actually quite common for the top comment to be against the aggregate opinion of the userbase.
This is the argument about why "bicycle licenses" aren't a thing. The number of drivers who aren't cyclists dwarfs the number of cyclists by many orders of magnitude in most US states. In many municipalities, some cyclists regularly break traffic laws and cause (at best) frustration or (at worst) deadly accidents. This leads to drivers-who-aren't-cyclists making the seems-reasonable comment that you should need a license to drive a bike the same way you do for a vehicle.
So let's say a politician supports bicycle license. This isn't enough to get anyone who supports a bike license to vote for them, because it's not a Top Ten issue for anyone on that side. But not only will every cyclist in their district vote against them, they'll campaign and donate to any opponent of that bill. If they even think you support the legislation they're writing checks to your opponent.
I'm not making an argument on bike licenses in particular but I can see a similar effect where a minority percentage of HN feels strongly enough about a given topic that they upvote the articles based on title alone. When an issue is particularly divisive, the odds increase that people feel strongly on both sides so you end up with the #1 posts on two different days expressing diametrically opposed positions, but both very heavily upvoted.