Do you have a source on this? I’m both curious and skeptical.
(And ironically, for many in Europe and Eastern NA/SA it’s the work day right now.)
On the anecdote side I do know that within the past couple of years I saw a discussion on here about how many visitors someone gets from a top of the front page on HN. The numbers were absolutely miserly compared to what I experienced getting the same repeatedly years earlier. Like, 1/20th or less.
Maybe it's just HN that declined, but if so where did the tech news community go? Digg? /. Reddit /r/programming (to some degree yes for the last one, though still it is nothing compared to what once was).
Everything is much quieter and more restrained than it was.
And sure, there are time zones circling the globe. But generally on the English tech sites, the US/Canada are going to dominate the demographics and have an outsized effect on spikes.
As it is it remains conjecture.
(Aside, this thread now has 300 comments after just 2 hours. HN’s purported slowdown in the WFH era feels grossly exaggerated.)
As to how many uniques you can expect from a front-page on HN, go ahead and search. Pre-2020 you can find countless people detailing 30,000+ uniques in the first few hours (my own, personal, direct experience was 50,000+). Now, if you average out more recent reports, you can expect about 11,000 over the first 24 hours.
And sure, the most inclusive possible discussion gets a few hundred comments. Everyone wants to put some paint on the shed. There is a 4 hour old submission on the front page with 2 comments. Eh, guess it doesn't represent much.
Aside, my personal anecdote is that this lack of decorum is why I rarely comment on HN anymore. So perhaps you are right.
Anyways, hope you have a good day.