What I find fascinating is the voting is this thread.
What I find to be reasonable comments from me are getting downvoting in a way that never usually happens on HN! Is it me? I didn't think that the HN community would turn so hard against the CDC and basic infectious disease research.
I was shocked by this during COVID. There's a huge anti-expertise, anti-institutions, anti-government-anything strain here, and they're very active on the various comment hiding buttons.
> What I find fascinating is the voting is this thread.
There's no reason to be fascinated. HN voting is generally inexplicable and random. For any given article, and even more so for any given comment, the "voter turnout" is extremely low, compared to the total HN user base. The votes depend crucially on which relatively small number of users happen to be around and reading at the time. It's always a mistake to project comment upvoting and downvoting into some kind of larger theory or conclusion.
Individual HN users upvote or downvote or neither for various, incongruous reasons. There's no unified theory or principle of voting.
The voting in this thread is far more variable and intense and random than in other threads. I have never had so many comments go up a few votes, then down suddenly into negative territory, and then have a slow recovery.
It says that the audience and/or audience behavior for this post is far different from most! It's very interesting and says a lot about the topic and HN, and is worthy of noting, IMHO.
A main point about this era is that it's not about infectious disease research. It's been transformed into a culture war that supersedes anything having to do with science. It's become right-wing-coded to object to the science of infectious disease. Not all people who identify on the right succumb to this, but obviously many do, and those people are seen here in the comments section daily.
It is the weekend HN effect. Conspiracy theories and low-information complaints thrive here on the weekends, presumably because of a weekly shift in audience demographics based on white collar working hours.
Sadly, no. Hacker News has hosted a large and vociferous contingent of anti-vaxxers ever since COVID, and their numbers have only grown over time. And they don't just post on the weekends.
What I find to be reasonable comments from me are getting downvoting in a way that never usually happens on HN! Is it me? I didn't think that the HN community would turn so hard against the CDC and basic infectious disease research.