I disagree. Some cursory searches on Clickhouse show me:
1. There was an exponential increase in people talking about FOSS, leveling out in 2021.
2. There's been an exponential decrease in people talking about startups, leveling out in 2021.
With that in mind, remember that there are karma gates to flagging and that you need many fewer flags than upvotes to sink something. My suspicion is that HN had a pretty big culture shift starting around 2016 but really peaking by 2021 that shifted from the old startup, builder focus to its current FOSS, anti-authoritarian mood. In other words the culture that used to be on Slashdot and technical subreddits found its way back onto HN. While the older HN was more homogeneous in its makeup and narrower in its topics it was also a lot less contentious than today's HN is, mirroring the culture found on Reddit and comment sections of tech-focused publications like The Verge. Today's HN is broad, unfocused, and a lot more like a mix of r/technology and r/programming than it used to be.
Flaggers, I suspect, have older HN values. They preferred the narrower focus of the old site and really dislike the highly contentious big comment threads that are on today's HN. It's hard to have proof of this since flaggers only interact by flagging, but it certainly is the opinion that I have as an older user well over the karma threshold to flag. As such I suspect we're seeing a culture clash play out where the flaggers are trying to hold onto older HN values while commenters here are engaging with HN in the way it's considered in the zeitgeist today, namely an alternative to tech subreddits.
Maybe the flaggers will keep the site balanced between the two perspectives but I suspect either the flaggers will get tired and churn.
1. There was an exponential increase in people talking about FOSS, leveling out in 2021.
2. There's been an exponential decrease in people talking about startups, leveling out in 2021.
With that in mind, remember that there are karma gates to flagging and that you need many fewer flags than upvotes to sink something. My suspicion is that HN had a pretty big culture shift starting around 2016 but really peaking by 2021 that shifted from the old startup, builder focus to its current FOSS, anti-authoritarian mood. In other words the culture that used to be on Slashdot and technical subreddits found its way back onto HN. While the older HN was more homogeneous in its makeup and narrower in its topics it was also a lot less contentious than today's HN is, mirroring the culture found on Reddit and comment sections of tech-focused publications like The Verge. Today's HN is broad, unfocused, and a lot more like a mix of r/technology and r/programming than it used to be.
Flaggers, I suspect, have older HN values. They preferred the narrower focus of the old site and really dislike the highly contentious big comment threads that are on today's HN. It's hard to have proof of this since flaggers only interact by flagging, but it certainly is the opinion that I have as an older user well over the karma threshold to flag. As such I suspect we're seeing a culture clash play out where the flaggers are trying to hold onto older HN values while commenters here are engaging with HN in the way it's considered in the zeitgeist today, namely an alternative to tech subreddits.
Maybe the flaggers will keep the site balanced between the two perspectives but I suspect either the flaggers will get tired and churn.