Sure, the examples I remember usually come up whenever there's a discussion over copyright and piracy. What I'll see is a discussion about whether piracy really hurts anyone with people arguing that it's free marketing and people who pirate wouldn't buy anyway. Then someone comes along and the subject moves on to open source vs free software. Someone says piracy is good because all software should be free. Then a bunch of people pile on and agree. Then one guy comes along saying that software companies aren't evil and developers should be able to charge for their work and piracy is bad. He is then downvoted to hell not because he said something off topic but because he held an unpopular opinion.
I actually totally agree with you and the other responder to my comment. Now that you guys have said something I feel like I should rhrase and simply say that sometimes I feel like the up and down vote buttons are sometimes abused. I hate to see group think win the day. I really think the downvote button is a great way to show people that what they're saying isn't okay around here. Downvoted comments get frayed out and are almost unreadable. That's a signal that the comment isn't worth reading at all more so than "it deserves less prominence". So instead if we just up vote the good stuff, ignore mediocre stuff, and downvote bad stuff, then I think we'd be helping to show participants what kind of community this is in a better way. The real trolls get punished. The guys who are boring won't be offended and will be more apt to contribute better stuff next time if you just give them no points at all.
Your example, to me, falls more in the category of "downvoted for retreading an old and tired discussion" than "downvoted for going against groupthink". Or, quite frequently, "downvoted for using HN as a soapbox rather than trying to contribute to the discussion". I find that the best comments in a discussion typically have at least some connection to the posted article, beyond simply discussing the same topic. The old and tired comments would work equally well in any number of other threads on different articles.
I don't tend to see groupthink as a problem in a community like HN. Sure, we tend to think about many things in the same ways (the ways we'd consider obviously right beyond any need for discussion, of course), but those tend to represent the boring topics anyway.
I do tend to follow the model you mention, ignoring mediocre stuff, rather than voting on everything. When I downvote things, I do indeed intend to suggest that people shouldn't bother reading it.
Fair enough. I'm not exactly an old hat myself. My account's less than a year old so maybe I'm totally off on this and it's me who should keep my mouth shut and learn a bit more. That said, I still think there's enough people who are karma police in that they hoard points and use the up/down vote system in not-so-honorable ways to merit some discussion about that. I also think there's enough group-think going on to merit mentioning too. I'll admit my example wasn't really solid but, hey, now that I said it maybe you'll be able to spot it next time and be able to come back and say I was right. Or wrong. But I'm decently confident it's prevalent enough to spot easily and quickly.
I actually totally agree with you and the other responder to my comment. Now that you guys have said something I feel like I should rhrase and simply say that sometimes I feel like the up and down vote buttons are sometimes abused. I hate to see group think win the day. I really think the downvote button is a great way to show people that what they're saying isn't okay around here. Downvoted comments get frayed out and are almost unreadable. That's a signal that the comment isn't worth reading at all more so than "it deserves less prominence". So instead if we just up vote the good stuff, ignore mediocre stuff, and downvote bad stuff, then I think we'd be helping to show participants what kind of community this is in a better way. The real trolls get punished. The guys who are boring won't be offended and will be more apt to contribute better stuff next time if you just give them no points at all.