HN has a diverse set of viewpoints. For any assertion one might make, there will be someone with the opposite viewpoint.
In addition to out-and-out opposition or agreement that sounds vaguely oppositional, a comment might call for a pedantic annotation, a tangential aside or book recommendation.
That Hitchens quote is pithy and snow-clonable but demonstrated an impoverished and static epistemology. It is circular and self-falsifying by respectively assuming the existence of “evidence” independent of the assertion’s observation bias and not obeying its own assertion.
In addition to out-and-out opposition or agreement that sounds vaguely oppositional, a comment might call for a pedantic annotation, a tangential aside or book recommendation.