Contrarian viewpoints (i.e. "this is actually different", "this is actually not surprising") are very popular on Hacker News and upvote based internet fora. Man

Contrarian viewpoints (i.e. "this is actually different", "this is actually not surprising") are very popular on Hacker News and upvote based internet fora. Many times they are actually low value, especially when they are not even particularly responding to a surprise in the original article, but to a surprise the poster initially had or an expected surprise the general audience should have. You can have a discussion on whether this is a good thing or not, but being smug about how "we knew better all along" is very low value. The best comments I feel shouldn't be about the type of response you should have to the article, it should be about the contents of the article. Yet comments like these trigger something in people to upvote it anyway.