Interestingly, in my country, people seem to be also migrating from Facebook et al to Reddit. Our main local, country-specific subreddit is clearly gaining users these days. (FB has been heavily used by the entire society here.)

I haven't followed this -- what's the demographic shift of Reddit about?

Aside of that, I think somebody on HN also pointed out that it is now easier to get downvotes here, because of an emerging trend to use downvote as an indicator of disagreeing with the OP or GP. Maybe the rise in upvotes is also part of the same "paradigm shift" (which I personally wouldn't like).

It would actually be great to have a HN user-level option that hides all vote/point counts, including the ones given to your own posts. Can probably be easily done with some browser addon, though, but a HN option would be nicer.