Not sure when you think this shift happened. HN intellectuals migrated from here almost 10 years ago. I don’t think the atmosphere has changed it’s always been a young loudmouth group. Dang is a recent entry in the compendium.
HN has never really been a highly intellectual place simply because a number of key subjects, viewpoints are off limits. Inability to at will gracefully discuss sensitive subjects basically means we are all pretending to believe what we say. I don’t know what cognitive ability research says about people being able to separate their identity and worldview from what they say, but there you have it.
Not sure. We had a period of “goodbye HN” posts. You can hopefully find them in the search results unless they got purged somehow. Those have stopped, haven’t seen one in many years. Basically people could sense they were in an unhealthy bubble and decided to cut ties. Good for them.
That fellow who would regularly post graphs of HN traffic/topic patterns at us to disprove peoples theories hasn’t posted it in many, many years. I guess he either woke up to reality or shrugged and moved on.
A few old timers remain here and there. I think we just got tired and fatigued of the bullshit.
HN has never really been a highly intellectual place simply because a number of key subjects, viewpoints are off limits. Inability to at will gracefully discuss sensitive subjects basically means we are all pretending to believe what we say. I don’t know what cognitive ability research says about people being able to separate their identity and worldview from what they say, but there you have it.