[gintery]

This site suffers from extreme group-think. Comments are essentially predictable, as anyone who disagrees with the public opinion will either refrain from posting or not get upvotes anyway. This is what you get from sorting content by vote count. I think that, ironically, the problem is technical and not so much social.

[sankalpb]

Thanks for raising this point - what makes you say that 'technical' and 'social' are separable as it relates to the problem of 'group-think' and 'sorting content by vote count'?

[gintery]

My guess would be that there's a feedback effect, where posters learn to only post comments which are likely to get upvotes. The net effect is that shared opinions converge. Ideally a comment section would be a sample of the whole distribution of opinions, while in practice only the mode of this distribution is represented. This is a direct effect of having votes on comments.

With regards to your question, what I meant was that these two aspects are in fact non-separable. The technical solution (upvotes) shapes the social behavior (the type of discussion) very strongly.