The general sentiment on HN against cryptocurrency and blockchain has always been pretty negative as far as I can can remember.
A quick algolia search seems to support that too. Most of the highest voted stories about cryptocurrency and blockchain are negative news and opinions. There are a few highly voted stories about cryptocurrencies and blockchain too, but far fewer.
If you search for something specific like Bitcoin, there looks at a glance to be more positive or neutral stories with high number of votes, and still a few negative ones about that too.
You’ll often find a few positive comments on the stories though, so it’s not like everyone hates it. Not saying that. But overwhelmingly I feel that HN readers as a whole range from disinterested to actively against anything blockchain and that this has been the case for a long time.
To go viral doesn’t mean it’s always a positive reception. If you’re shopping karma points, it just takes getting people engaged and posting something that is known to grate people is the easy play. Just look at all of the drama on Wordpress. Just look at all of social media algos.
"One just needs to write $currentTrendingFad to get the same effect"
Not too long ago it could have been crypto/blockchain, or rewriting $app in $lang
That's the thing of viral is it is just trend following, so recognizing the trend helps the changes of going viral