The article itself was a bit disappointing because it focused on political issues. In my opinion the strength of HN in this regard is that it is both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right", as evidenced by the fact that a comment on a controversial topic can easily float near zero points while raking in both upvotes and downvotes. And even those who refer to it as "the orange site" still come back and comment. In other words, HN may be an echo chamber but it is a pretty big one with a lot of voices in it.
I assume that the mass upvotes/downvotes are exactly that.
Lots of other commentators I've seen on here are experience pilots, engineers, etc. Maybe not Bill Gates money but certainly on the higher end of the bell-curve when it comes to education and pay.
I don't disagree that there is a lot of aspirational talk on here too -- they wanna get rich -- but again, it's the news site that's part of a startup incubator. What did you expect?
At first I was a little amazed that many negative articles and comments about these companies were being down-voted, just notice the latest article on the status of a pregnant employee at Google, where the discussion's focus was very quickly and conveniently moved from how said employee had been mistreated by Google to how bad it is that Google allows its employees to discuss freely on these topics.
I didn't understand how come these companies have so many fans on this website, but then I realized that some of these users' total comp largely depends on how those companies' shares behave. If I'm not mistaken a FAANG engineer with 10 year of experience has his comp at about 200k in actual salary and the same figure in redeemable shares, so their total comp can approach 4-500k, half of it in shares. As such, it makes perfect sense to downvote everyone that says bad and unpleasant things about your company, because your money actually depends on it. Not sure that there's anything we, the non-FAANG employees, can do about that.
If it matters I've been an user of this website for quite some time, I just wanted to mention that I'm neither powerful nor wealthy.
I see that in certain other topics as well, such as discussions of the 737 as mentioned in the article.
Along with intellectual curiosity, I think it's important to cultivate intellectual humility, and they go together. A lot of what we think we know just by reading the news isn't all that well-founded, so asserting a strongly-held opinion isn't justified. I'm reminded of a cartoon about collecting questions, rather than answers:
http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park
So, if you're wondering about downvotes, overconfidence might be a reason, or at least for one downvote.