Yes, it used to be much more optimistic and less cynical.
The cynicism and optimism seems to have stayed more or less constant. The quality of conversation is the problem.
Luckily, quality tends to bubble to the top, barring manual intervention that occasionally makes a few (few) mistakes. So far.
The extremes are true: I've increasingly felt that people here are disconnected from reality in a way not seen in previous years. I'm not quite sure how to put it into words, and it deserves a substantive eloquence beyond my capabilities at the moment.
HN's political discourse has been quite unpleasant since last couple of years. Used to be quite a gamut of perspectives, now it is completely lopsided.
I quite like the 'what are you doing this weekend threads' it feels very small-community-like. [But that might just be that I've often felt a lack of tech community - as an example, I've used Linux for >20 years and don't have anyone in my life I could have a conversation about it with like you might chat to a neighbour/friend about pruning a tree or fixing your car.]
Here we totally disagree.
Before people used to be banned without explanation, some views would be downvoted heavily etc.
Today it is better: there is even room for republican voices as long as they are reasonable.
And yes, I've been here over a decade.
"I think we're less"
"I'd say it's the same"
It should be pretty straightforward to actually figure this out by sampling posts from different HN "eras" and doing sentiment analysis.
What's the standard practice for sentiment analysis these days?
> I've increasingly felt that people here are disconnected from reality in a way not seen in previous years.
Well, I don’t think that is surprising given the rise of popularity of HN. The early days had people interested in startups, and hence their virtues, and later came a large crowd that had some interest in tech but had random alignments.
I feel that human beliefs form a distribution where almost anything will believed by someone, and if you gather a large enough crowd you can find a large cohort that will earnestly believe various nonsense things.