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It seems like HN got more 'Reddit-like' in the last year or two, at least it resembles that platform in the way people use voting not as a way to encourage good argument style and punish bad (eg. ad hominem) but rather to vote with their feelings.

There are also a ton of one-line comments now, some that get upvoted to the top. That's 100 percent Reddit and 0 percent intellect.

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It has been a few years now, probably mid to late 2010s if I had to guess. I'm sure someone with enough interest and tokens could do some kind of sentiment/data measurement in order to back up our anecdotes.

I've been active here since 2009 and it started to get worse around 2016, and much worse in the last 2 years. Before 2016, any flippant, pointlessly cynical comment would be downvoted to oblivion. There were almost none that didn't get dead'd quickly. Now on political topics, those are the top half of comments.

There were always negative objection comments (like the famous dropbox one), but those are different. Many of these new cynical comments are not objecting, they're concurring with a poisonous cynicism.

I remember making this topic in late 2016 regarding it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13016237

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