[Karrot_Kream]

Something that makes this all harder is that HN and other sites don't exist in a vacuum. There's an external world that shapes the opinions and ideas of people.

When I joined HN, hacking was mostly for nerds. The real important tech people worked on chips or devices and the money makers were in finance. This has changed. With it has come an interest in lurid tech coverage, like the existence of sites like "Techdirt", and something about software has led to the growth of a tabloid style news interest in it in a way that never happened for hardware (probably an artifact of the rise of tech being concomitant and convergent with the evolution of the Internet.) There's also been a lot of other changes going on in the greater world as the internet has become a larger part of our lives. I suspect those changes outside "in the real world" that eventually finding itself into here.

For me the antidote has been more focused conversations on other sites like Discord or BlueSky but this is all very personal.