For what it's worth I don't think things have changed much over the time I've been reading it (I was reading here before I made this account and have used other accounts). The topics have changed but not the political tenor. Maybe it was different before that but I'm not sure.
I do agree I've been a little surprised at some of the comments and submissions sometimes. There are topics that would have been flagged before that are now allowed to remain (so maybe things have changed?), but I also think topic boundaries have become fuzzier.
My general sense is that many traditional science and technology topics have become politicized themselves in a way they used to not be. COVID is a prime example of this in some ways; trying to approach it from a "purely" biological-scientific perspective is probably impossible. Some of the controversies surrounding the 2016 and 2020 elections, at least in the US, are other examples: regardless of how you identify politically, it is true that issues related to tech were critically involved.
I guess I just see the world as being a different place than 5 years ago even; ignoring certain topics just because they involve politics would be strange in some ways.
I think the more telling issues are whether tech and science are disappearing from HN, and what the nature of the comments are. I'm not sure that those have changed much, but that's just my personal opinion. I can think of ways that comments in the past were moderated that seemed pretty brutal to me, in many of the same ways comments are now.
If someone really wanted to address this, I suppose they'd have to do some kind of topic-sentiment analysis on HN posts and comments. Doable, and interesting, but not of interest to me enough personally to be worth it to me to do.
I do agree I've been a little surprised at some of the comments and submissions sometimes. There are topics that would have been flagged before that are now allowed to remain (so maybe things have changed?), but I also think topic boundaries have become fuzzier.
My general sense is that many traditional science and technology topics have become politicized themselves in a way they used to not be. COVID is a prime example of this in some ways; trying to approach it from a "purely" biological-scientific perspective is probably impossible. Some of the controversies surrounding the 2016 and 2020 elections, at least in the US, are other examples: regardless of how you identify politically, it is true that issues related to tech were critically involved.
I guess I just see the world as being a different place than 5 years ago even; ignoring certain topics just because they involve politics would be strange in some ways.
I think the more telling issues are whether tech and science are disappearing from HN, and what the nature of the comments are. I'm not sure that those have changed much, but that's just my personal opinion. I can think of ways that comments in the past were moderated that seemed pretty brutal to me, in many of the same ways comments are now.
If someone really wanted to address this, I suppose they'd have to do some kind of topic-sentiment analysis on HN posts and comments. Doable, and interesting, but not of interest to me enough personally to be worth it to me to do.