Comment by mschuster91
4 days ago
One thing I've noticed over the decades here: anti-capitalism used to get you flagged to death in the past... but since Covid and especially since the Russian invasion and associated price shocks / cost-of-living crisis, it takes a lot to even get downvoted.
The HN culture used to be almost exclusively a ton of nerds thinking that tech and the free market would be the answer for everything - but the last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.
> The HN culture used to be almost exclusively a ton of nerds thinking that tech and the free market would be the answer for everything - but the last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.
IMO it's more the HN userbase has expanded, a lot, and now includes a lot of people who aren't the same tech enthusiasts the site had historically. Yeah, I know, eternal September and all that, but to put it into perspective: Trump's first election victory got 2215 comments[0], his second election victory got 9275 comments[1]. There are some mitigating factors here--iirc HN was having downtime issues due to the traffic in 2016--but HN was already pretty popular among tech enthusiasts 9 years ago, and it's grown 400% from that!
I'm sure some people have changed their minds, but any shifts (perceived or real) in politics on HN are more likely due to changes in the userbase over time, IMO.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057647
> I'm sure some people have changed their minds, but any shifts (perceived or real) in politics on HN are more likely due to changes in the userbase over time, IMO.
"Eternal September" explains (correctly IMHO) why there are more people of a different background, but more people doesn't explain why it is very noticeable that downvotes and deathflags don't happen as frequently as before.
> last few years have served as a brutal, but very effective reality check for a lot of people.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much of a good side to it all. Work from home maybe?
It’s back a ton of progress on many fronts. Counter examples welcomed.