I do agree I've been a little surprised at some of the comments and submissions sometimes. There are topics that would have been flagged before that are now allowed to remain (so maybe things have changed?), but I also think topic boundaries have become fuzzier.
My general sense is that many traditional science and technology topics have become politicized themselves in a way they used to not be. COVID is a prime example of this in some ways; trying to approach it from a "purely" biological-scientific perspective is probably impossible. Some of the controversies surrounding the 2016 and 2020 elections, at least in the US, are other examples: regardless of how you identify politically, it is true that issues related to tech were critically involved.
I guess I just see the world as being a different place than 5 years ago even; ignoring certain topics just because they involve politics would be strange in some ways.
I think the more telling issues are whether tech and science are disappearing from HN, and what the nature of the comments are. I'm not sure that those have changed much, but that's just my personal opinion. I can think of ways that comments in the past were moderated that seemed pretty brutal to me, in many of the same ways comments are now.
If someone really wanted to address this, I suppose they'd have to do some kind of topic-sentiment analysis on HN posts and comments. Doable, and interesting, but not of interest to me enough personally to be worth it to me to do.
I'm from Europe, and to me this site is incredibly conservative, but I see a lot of people from the US that think the opposite.
By 2020 you had what I call "beer beer" activists. You know that part about "free as in speech" vs "free as in beer?" well in their case they want "free" speech in the sense that somebody else has to pay for it. So maybe they are really just into beer. And yeah, they lean right.
By 2022 those people had gone in the direction that a free printing press wasn't enough but now it is awful that people can downvote their comments. If nothing intervened I predicted that soon these people would be complaining that we're not upvoting their comments, soon they'd be livid that we aren't clapping and grinning like idiots at everything they say.
Then the Ukraine war intervened and displaced most of the usual BS... For a while.
Especially the last paragraph.
Maybe I'm idealizing the way things were, but it seemed that 6 or 8 years ago, someone could say something that people disagreed with, but say it in a way that was thoughtful. Now, much of the time, it will be said in a way that is not thoughtful at all, but only strident. But I don't think it's because people changed. It's usually newer people who post that way.
I think as HN became more popular, it became a more attractive target for those wishing to do ideological battle. (Why bother doing propaganda on a small, non-influential site?) This drowned out the thoughtful posts. And, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop, some of the older folks quit or posted less frequently.
I see too many conversations where it's obvious that one side isn't really listening, but only arguing. That's not an interesting discussion. It's like beating your head against a brick wall to be a part of, but it's also uninteresting to read if you aren't a part of it.
In my opinion, this is still the best site there is, but it's less than it was in 2014.
I've read some rather unique view points here on HN and it's definitely changed my mind on a lot of topics even though I wasn't involved in the discussion.
1. "Political stuff" (however you want to define that) now seems to be generally more accepted in general. I believe there are discussions here now that just didn't happen 12+ years ago.
2. The political bias seems to have shifted a bit away from the "techno-libertarian" view and more towards a view that, in American terms, might vaguely be described as "left leaning" - that is, more anti-capitalist, pro-big-government, etc.
Whether these developments are good or bad things is subject to debate of course.
Then it was flooded with pseudo-intellectual leftists and things went bad quickly.