Out of curiosity of someone who missed out on this, what is the site vulnerable to?
If you're interested, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 are other places I wrote about this recently.
It's the biggest problem facing HN, in my opinion.
Surprisingly the latest increase in polarization around generative AI has impacted Hacker News the least our of all tech social spaces.
What I'm interested in is how well HN does at fulfilling its own mandate in its own terms. On that scale, it's getting worse—in this respect, at least, which is a big one. We're going to do something about it, the same way we've always tried to stave off the decline of this place (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
If you're right that the phenomenon is affecting other places even more than HN then I guess we get to be the-worst-internet-forum-except-for-all-the-others even more than before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494318, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) - not a bad outcome for HN, though I think it might be overly optimistic.
I don't mean to express doubt (you would know better than I) but what makes you say that?
Do you think it's a consequence of external factors like the current political climate or of internal factors like HN getting larger?
I'm not sure it's about HN getting larger, though. It's a bit hard to tell, but at least some of the upswing in cynical and curmudgeonly comments is coming from established users.