It's not worth paying attention to vote counts on HN; it's been years since I've taken them seriously. It's worth hanging out here for the smart people that remain, but there are a lot of dumb people with aspirations to the "magic" of success in SV that don't realize that being aggressively narrow-minded is explicitly counterproductive.

I think this is just the lifecycle of any space with low barriers to entry full of smart people. There are positive effects from smart people interacting openly, dumb people notice the effects and want a piece, and they flood the zone with their dumbness without realizing how anathema it is to what attracted them there in the first place.