HN has become per-thread view-enforced. It's pretty obvious now what the "correct" views are for any given thread, any dissenting comments are downvoted to death. When the next thread comes along, the opposite view might be the "allowed one". There's a particularly egregious amount of veiled partisanship behind a lot of posting too.

This could be a group think phenomenon, or it could be botting. Hard to say. I'd say in at least a few cases, it's someone with access and interest into bot downvotes landing on a thread and using that to suppress dissenting views.