The good old days, most fantastic. Now it's to degenerated into some combination of echo chamber and safe place, with no lively debate, certainly not about anything controversial. Very sad.
There are some topics that are very predictable, some of them are noticeably left issues, some things more loosely connected. Crypto, Tesla, Brave, Facebook, Israel, etc. are all subjects you'll most likely get heavily downvoted and probably flagged if you don't view the common (to here) opinion.
HN is not immune to group think and talking points get parroted here often, dissenting views flagged and downvoted. But not always, it's definitely nowhere near Reddit bad.
Like I said at the top, it's the best place on the internet to have a discussion, but not perfect, and seemingly getting a worse slowly, the way it always seems to go.
The flipside is I can actually share my somewhat left of center views without being flagged and downvoted into oblivion as long as I practice a little decorum. If anything, the quality is up because people have to put a little effort in now.
Decorum is always welcome, but that's not really what I'm talking about, my main observation has been the group think, parroting of talking points, downvoting without disputing, and most importantly flagging to disagree with/hide dissent.
Some topics draw it more than others, I mentioned the obvious ones, it seeps into others though.
It doesn't matter how cordial you are, sometimes you will be flagged for your contrarian views.
Honestly user flagging and possibly even downvoting should be removed, it's abused too much.
A simple block button that would hide all posts from the user for that client would suffice, mods could look at block rates of a post/user and review if it is spam or breaks the rules.
I'm sorry but I don't need another person's opinion of a post to grey out or hide a comment. I can make the judgement for myself whether I disagree with it or not.