> It shows that people in general don't just respectfully disagree with differing opinions. People attack all opinions that aren't inline with theirs.
It's not just that. The achilles heel of HN's readership/voting behavior is its bias towards positivity and validation, and against criticism and sarcasm. I've got tons of fake internet points here, so I often do some experiments to test this out. As a general rule, with some exceptions: No matter what the topic is, if your comment is positive, shows approval or otherwise supportive of the topic, you'll tend to get upvotes. If you raise concerns, point out flaws, or express cynicism, you're going to get downvoted.
So when something comes up that's actually false or suspect, the correct skeptics get downvoted, and the incorrect people praising the article are promoted to the top. I wish I had access to the raw data to do a sentiment analysis on the comments and compare it to voting trends. I guarantee they are correlated!
Ironically, the first vote on this comment was down.