Funny though how all these oh-so-objctive algorithms -- your rule of thumb for weighting threads, "the flamewar detector" on posts, "SNI", etc, etc -- seemingly always
just so happen to have the outcome they have.
Sorry, you may be (are probably) being perfectly honest and sincere, but... It's still too many coincidences not to give rise to doubts. If about nothing else, then about the weights in your algorithms (the post of a negative-headline article that lasted under two hours on the front page didn't look all that much more flame-war-y to me than the one off a positive-headline one that lasted over twelve) or your definition of "significant" ("Breaking news, OAI says they didn't do it!" Yeah right, how is that significant; which crook doesn't say that wasn't actually his paw in the cookie jar?).
Or maybe it's bigger; maybe it's time for the, uhm, "tone" of the entire site to change? I mean, society at large seems to have come to the insight that wannabe rentier techbros just aren't likely to be good guys. And maybe your intended audience -- "startup hackers", something like that, right? -- are beginning to resemble mainstream society in this respect?
Maybe we "Hackers" are coming to the realisation that on the current trajectory of the tech industry in the late-stage capitalism era, "two guys with their laptops in a garage" are not very likely to become even (paltry!) multi-millionaires, because all the other "two guys with their laptops in a garage" ten-fifteen-twenty years ago (well, the ones of them that made it, anyway) installed such insurmountable moats around their respective fiefdoms ("pulled up the ladder behind them", as we'd say if they were twenty years older) that making it big as an actual "Hacker" is becoming nigh-impossible?
I mean, to try and illustrate by example: The Zuck zucks even in the mind of most HN regulars, right? But if you trawl through early posts (pre-2017? -14? -10?), betcha he's on average much more revered here than he is now. A bit like Musk still seems to be, and up until a year or whatever ago, that other Sam (Frazzled Blinkman?) was, and... The rate and mechanism of change here seems to be "Oops, yet another exception, a wannabe rentier techbro who turned out to be a slimebag. But as a group, wannabe rentier techbros are of course still great!" Maybe it's time to go through the algorithms and prejudices and turn down all the explicit and implicit the "Wannabe Zuck[1] = Must be great!" dials?
Because as it is, these biases -- "just percieved" as you seem to be saying, "implicit and built into the very foundations of HN" as I'd tentatively say; does it even matter which it is? -- seem to be making HN not a forum for the current-day "two guys with their laptops in a garage", but for fanboyism of the (current and) next group of Bezoses, Zuckerbergs and Musks[1]. Sorry, I haven't checked out the mission statement recently (even though you so graciously linked to it), but is that really what HN is supposed to be?
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[1]: Well, I'm old enough that I almost wrote "Gates and Ellison" there... Add them in if you want.