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Comment by pearjuice | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain to me how this is not putting the common denominator in more power even further? At this point, unless you extensively agree with the majority of the echo circle, I doubt you will be able to have any impact on discussions.

Every thread is a rehearsal with same opinions at the top over and over and non-fitting opinions float to the bottom. In which turn, they get less "downvote-power" so they will stay low and can't get their peers above. I am not saying that the current flow of discussion is bad, I am just saying that participation is flawed.

We are simply in a system where you get awarded to fit to the masses and you get more power once you have been accepted into the hive-mind. A circular-reference at some point.

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This is a really popular belief with understandable roots in human nature, but it simply isn't true. It's not hard to be skeptical of the things the echo-chamber (which definitely exists) values. In fact, assuming a skeptical pose is a karma-positive strategy for HN.

The problem isn't contrarianism; it's banal meanness. Hackpad sells to Dropbox and the top of the thread is, for a time, somebody talking about how the acquisition is a sign that the whole startup house of cards is falling. A markov HN cynic could write that comment; it's boring, it's distracting, and it's mean-spirited: some of the people who worked on Hackpad also read HN.

If you're going to be contrary, don't be boring and don't be mean. You'll be fine.

Signed,

Longtime YC Cynic

Outside of the echo circle you have a celeb circle. They intersect at some point but the intersected oval isn't that big. I am not saying you are common-denominator-fluff, just that some people simply upvote you when they see your user name.

Having said that, I think your opinion and views on the echo-chamber are highly biased and out of scope.

I'm not talking about me. Look at 'michaelochurch. Or, out of the echo-chamber along a different vector, 'rayiner.

I don't know what your last sentence means.

"Highly biased" probably isn't fair. Thomas goes looking for heated discussions, but what's the point if HN we can't have a good thesis defense every now and again. :)

I'm shocked that someone who disagreed with tptacek got downvoted.

You're really playing into the echo chamber of "celebrities" by giving such a damn.

The solution is to stop caring about upvotes and karma. They are internet friendship points, not validations of personality.

It may be. Hacker News was created to combat the "Eternal September" problem, and if you're a relatively new user who moves against the consensus, you may be the problem it's trying to solve. Although, I suspect the intent is to encourage civility more than groupthink (even with the new group moderation feature, I think real censorship would be impossible without a large scale purge of new users - the diversity of opinion is just too great.)

Find a comment that was well articulated and didn’t match what you consider the hive-mind; find as many as you can, really: show how those got more downvotes than similar comments matching the majority opinion, and less visibility as a consequence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7481111

Here's one of them. I could spit through dozens of comments and put a whole list of comments here to satisfy your request further - but would it make a difference? It's well known (and probably verified research can confirm) that vote-systems adhere to common denominator circle-jerking.

There's "out of the echo chamber", and then there's "fully out of the scope of HN", and debating the merits of Turkey's suppression of the Internet vis a vis the Internet as a conduit for western propaganda is "fully out of the scope of HN".

There are good places to have that debate, and HN just isn't one of them.

Yup. It's not a geopolitics IRC chat. Only the tech aspects of evading censorship would qualify but only if they were novel.

That comment was (a) not substantive, and (b) inflammatory. It was appropriate to downvote it. I'd guess it got more downvotes for being a (very) minority view than it otherwise would have, but that doesn't mean it didn't deserve them.

By "not substantive" I do not mean false, but rather that the signal-to-noise ratio of a comment containing many grand, unsupported claims is low.

Since you don't want to provide us with dozens of examples, how about picking, say, three that have the highest signal-noise ratio of the lot, and weren't uncivil? I'd like to see those. I know such comments exist, because I see them, yet the people charging HN with groupthink never seem to cite any clear examples.

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