[Mountain_Skies]

Hacker News' eventual death started the moment it joined the hysteria over the Lab Leak Theory. Since then it has trended more and more to be like Reddit, with ideological tribal concerns occupying an increasingly large mindshare. This drives away people who want to have earnest conversations in good faith, giving even more power to the ideologues. It will be a long death spiral but you can see it happening day by day.

[tim333]

I'm not sure what hysteria about lab leaks? I mean maybe it did, maybe it didn't.

[robertlagrant]

I've genuinely never seen "hysteria" from the people talking about the lab leak theory. The closest I've seen is from people who were extremely keen for no one to mention the theory. Not because of some cover-up, but I think just because that was what everyone was telling everyone else to do, hysteria-style.

[yarg]

The idea that the novel coronavirus didn't escape from the local coronavirus R&D laboratory never had anywhere near enough evidence to be credible.

It was pretty much the WHO simply repeating the claims of the Chinese government, who had already tried to cover up the outbreak (with any warnings sent to the WHO coming from Taiwan instead).

It was about as believable as the completely baseless claims that the emergency use authorised vaccine was safe and effective.