I downvoted it because it bears little relation to this story, not because I disagreed with it. It's basically complaining that they're not getting enough love from other members. The mods don't quash comments merely because they convey dissenting opinions; they quash them when they become toxic to the community.
The words I chose are specifically meant to highlight the downsides.
1. Groupthink has a negative connotation of the downsides baked in.
2. "Hyper" conformity (or hyper anything) is already saying that it is too much.
I think it's well known and appreciated that without diversity of thought and opinion, a group or organization makes possibly locally optimized, but poor decisions.
I know you were, and it’s troubling. You’re ascribing a sinister character to a literally normal phenomenon merely because you disagree with the outcome. And a normal distribution anticipates diversity within the sample: if there were no outliers, the distribution wouldn't look the way it does.
This kind of thinking led to the term “mainstream media” becoming a pejorative term, even though it fairly represented the majority viewpoint. In a well-informed society[1], one should expect the majority opinion to be the one closest to objective truth. (Consider the old “guess the number of jelly beans in the jar” experiment.)
[1] Yes, I am aware that this condition is doing some heavy lifting. :-)
I guess you could say the comment is conflating the mod team and the community.
I think the community can be pretty susceptible to groupthink and hyper-conformity, and there are tons of legitimate criticisms around that. But it's true that usually the mod team won't suffer directly from that, from what I've seen.