I don't know; consciously recognizing this tendency in myself is one of the reasons I deleted my reddit account and seriously scaled back my contribution here.

I don't know; consciously recognizing this tendency in myself is one of the reasons I deleted my reddit account and seriously scaled back my contribution here. I observed behaviour in myself that I found distasteful, but it wasn't before that behaviour had become entrenched and I had become a top-100 poster on HN (by overall karma) that I noticed it. I can easily postulate a reality wherein others, as I did, unconsciously adopt hivemind opinions so as to maximize the social validation of karma without realizing that they're doing so or intentionally gaming the system in that way.