Yeah, Reddit at times does seem like some bizarre group think type of thing in terms of how comments are downvoted or upvoted. Coming from Reddit, in Hackernews it seems people are more accepting of controversial ideas.

If votes were visible, and everyone was allowed to downvote, Hacker News would indeed probably be a lot worse

This seems to have gotten much worse in recent weeks and I don’t understand why.

On a wide array of subs, spanning many topics. Moderators seem to be very quick suddenly to quash decenting opinions.