[davidw]

> Am I just seeing outliers here?

They are 'outrage posts' - stuff that gets attention because it makes you angry.

I do not think they are very healthy for the focus of this community because the number of outrageous injustices in the world far outweighs the number of good posts about startups and hacking. Also, they attract pretty much anyone because it's not hard to have an opinion about them, whereas "Clojure vs Erlang for a distributed system" is likely to attract a far more restricted group of people.