Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed a recent sentiment shift on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed a recent sentiment shift on HN?

I've frequented HN off-and-on for over a decade now, with some fairly long stretches of inactivity interspersed.

In the last couple of years in particular, I'm pretty sure I noticed a hard-shift in the kinds of posts that were being up/downvoted, comments being made, etc. This was very similar to bot activity on other platforms, and it represented a significant pull to the right. I'm not trying to be political here, but there's no way to be clear without stating it.

But, recently, it's as if all of that relented and HN has kind of "normalized" again. For instance, I'm seeing more posts that are critical of DOGE or Musk that would have been downvoted. Now it's the opposite.

I don't know if this is attributable to the discovery of bot farms that were eliminated by HN mods or something else, but it does not seem organic.

Has anyone else noticed this?

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Maybe, just maybe, the absurd carelessness of DOGE and the tariffs were enough to make some people rethink their previous beliefs.

Probably not.

But it's a nice fantasy.

There are two trends:

- Higher interest rates

- Everything is AI

There are simply less startups, less interesting programming topics, fewer things to learn or look forward to, and even all of the big venture capital bros have switched their interests to politics.

The simple concept of HN is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting." ... and frankly, there's not much else for "good hackers" to be interested in right now.

I think the rightward blip is just a reality of HN - people don't come here to get hivemind takes like from Reddit. They generally want something contrarian and more thought out. But I think in the long run even contrarian positions reach their conclusions against reality.

It's because the election ended and the astroturfing fulfilled it's purpose.

Well, if HN primarily and accurately reflects the mood of US workers and industries, and the populace of the US made a strong swing to the red/right over the last couple years,

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/06/us/politics/p...

then you’d expect a red shift in posts and responses.

If external agents want to manipulate HN opinion away from that right shift, then you’d expect posts, flagging, upvote/downvote, and posting patterns by such agents with an objective of achieving that.

I’ve seen evidence of both.

But these are all just bits on a screen…I try not to get too hung up on seeing rabbits in clouds. The HN community is a tiny slice of the US, much less the World. I try not to let any echo chamber distort the larger picture, so that I don’t make the same political errors in judgement that led to the recent Democrats performance failures in the last election.

All my comments for the past month have 1, 0, or negative votes. These are perfectly reasonable comments. This never happened, until the past few years. So I think something has changed. Getting an upvoted comment means having to write the Magna Carta or something, and this assumes someone does not later downvote it. It does not matter if left-right wing. Someone will downvote. For this reason I have done much less commenting in recent months.

> and the populace of the US made a strong swing to the red/right over the last couple years

It didn't, though. Like, as the site you linked says, you're talking about a shift of on the order of 5%, and it's largely a reversal of a slightly smaller shift in the other direction 4 years ago. That's pretty much noise, and you wouldn't expect it to make a substantial difference on this site.

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

I think a lot of people have realised that their emperors have no clothes.

I have noticed more downvoting in general of comments compared to pre-2022 or so, and it's not like it's trollish or bad responses being downvoted. It's an eggshell thing. Comments even get downvoted when there are replies in agreement. It's not a left-right thing. Even apolitical stuff gets downvoted. Comments about health, obesity, diet tend to get a lot of downvotes if they question conventional wisdom (obesity rates at record highs, yet any commentary or advice that deviates from convention or expertise is downvoted even these experts with their generic advice cannot actually help the majority of people lose weight).

>It's not a left-right thing. Even apolitical stuff gets downvoted. Comments about health, obesity, diet tend to get a lot of downvotes...

Well, everything has become political though, right? I mean, you mentioned health, but that's actually a hyper-political topic.

maybe political division has made people more inclined to downvote out of disagreement overall, as being symptomatic of angrier times.

Honesty, I have to disagree. 2020 seems like the height of downvoting to me. My suspicion then was an anti-vaxxer voting ring. There was also a pro-trump under current, 2018-2020, Jan 6 seems to have ended that.

HN goes through its phases, which often coincide what is happening in the real world.

Off the top of my head, a few of the major shifts happened when:

- COVID-19 sent everyone home (suddenly a lot of graybeards disappeared)

- Elon Musk bought Twitter

- Donald Trump was inaugurated

There was also a time in the past when Facebook, Google, and Twitter employees would poke fun at the secrecy of Apple employees because they would almost never post on HN. Today, all of the big tech employees are either absent or in stealth mode. Which is a shame, because this forum has lost a lot of useful insight and institutional knowledge.

I don't know what HN's traffic or demographics are like, but my guess is that it skews a lot younger, a lot less experienced, and a lot more high school/college than it did ten years ago.

>HN goes through its phases

I've definitely observed this over the years, but there has also been a fair bit of consistency in the form of certain through-lines and more balance.

In any case, what I'm describing is a pretty sudden shift—in particular the recent "re-normalization".

Yes, the Elon Musk super fans have gone quiet. There was a time when Musk and his fans were riding a wave of enthusiasm, but with Tesla and Starship problems they've dialed it back. Silicon Valley people were riding it too with tech billionaires standing at the podium inauguration day and soon after announcing the half a trillion Stargate AI program. Things are more muted now. Back to normal as you say.

>There was a time when Musk and his fans were riding a wave of enthusiasm, but with Tesla and Starship problems they've dialed it back.

That's the thing though: those stans were (and still are on some other platforms) very vocal, irrespective of his copious ups and downs (e.g. prior Tesla problems, Twitter debacle, provocative/bad behavior, etc).

In fact, it seemed the worse things were the more vocal they became (like a PR army), and that included here on HN until very recently, IMO.

Oh they're still very active on X, but some of that is bots, which don't work as well on Hacker News. They get flagged here.

You can only promise people self-driving cars and Mars and so on, while actually giving them a somewhat worse Twitter and breaking the government, before they eventually get sick of you, I suppose.

Like, I'm sure there are still die-hard Musk superfans out there, but you've got to imagine that a lot of his followers eventually became disillusioned.

I've noticed this happening on HN with other stuff to some extent; way back in the day HN was one of the most Bitcoin-enthusiastic places out there, but that tide eventually turned. Same for NFTs. Arguably you can now see it starting to happen for AI.

I get everything you said except HN turning on AI. I see it many other places but not here. People are experimenting to find the good parts.

A year or so ago HN was basically all in on "this is the singularity"; things are currently drifting somewhat more towards reality.

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