[tomhow]

HN is, at the time of writing, over 48 million posts over nearly two decades. Whatever you want to notice, you'll notice plenty of examples of. So, sure, I guess there has been plenty of "simping" over the years on HN. There has also been plenty of the opposite of it. As someone who reads the comments (particularly the most emotionally charged ones) every day, the sentiment towards prominent tech companies and leaders has been leaning decidedly negative on HN for several years.

[KingMob]

If you're focusing on emotionally charged comments, then you're looking at a biased data set, yes?

I have you tagged as an admin; have you ever thought of blogging statistical/ML analyses of HN sentiment?

[tomhow]

Yep I'm a moderator and we're reading all the threads all the time, so we get a sense of the overall sentiment. Yes we read the worst comments because they're the ones that needour attention with respect to account penalties and bans. But we still read over all the threads, so we'd see it if there was a large "simping" contingent or tred. But we don't see that; what we see instead generally aligns with HN's reputation for being critical, skeptical, cynical and, at times, curmudgeonly. Much that has its roots in HN's "hacker" ethos, which is anti-establishment by definition. There is a good amount of positivity and enthusiasm too, but barely ever for major companies and rich/powerful figures it's most commonly for small teams and freelance/indie developers who have built a cool project or useful tool. We are thinking about what kind of data analysis would be good to publish.