>Those people are people with high HN karma, a lot of it for posting or submitting technical discussions.

Click on a few of those names and see what kind of topics they wade into. I wish you were right.

You're not gonna get high karma by having high quality technical discussion. First off no human can likely know enough depth on enough topics to contribute to very many of them. Second off, such commentary only gets praise from the narrow band of people who are capable of assessing it.

Like all "scored" social-ish media this stuff is a numbers game. The way you "win" as these people have is by gaming the scoring system. Post stuff that appeals to the demographics of the site and with a low common denominator so anyone can "approve" of it. And if you click on through you'll find that's what they do.

>Is that enough to give that much weight to their opinion on political topics?

I assure you that a great many of them take great offense when you suggest that they are not experts in whatever they are speaking at a given minute. My personal favorites are the one that appeals to authority by cherry picking links (thereby moving the discussion from one of attacking his opinion to one of attacking his sources, a tried and true troll/propagandist/etc tactic) when you disagree with him and the one tries to portray being involved in politics as though it confers legitimacy.

That said, some of the power users around here are in fact reasonable and seemingly free of obvious ill will.

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