I have noticed this trend for a long time also, and well before this article was first written. It seems to go in waves though I'll cautiously say that it seems to have gotten somewhat better in recent years. I remember a time in the mid-2010s when these kinds of stories would disappear almost instantaneously. Now some of these articles and topics get a good number of upvotes and occasionally even substantive dialogue.
That said, the comments sections on these articles do tend to devolve pretty quickly.
And when people say they want it discussed, they don't mean they want to read diverse opinions, they just mean they want to see orthodoxy regurgitated.
I wasn't really interested in all those Reddit stories last month either, mostly because they were all exactly the same wankfest. So I just hid them. Problem solved.
As long as the frontpage isn't overrun with these kind of stories every day I don't really see the problem. Even when restricted to purely technical topics – and HN is NOT for purely technical topics – there's will always be heaps of stories you won't be interested in for one reason or the other, and that's fine.
Also includes some other things like changed styling and whatnot; it's not really "for publication" and some tweaking may be required, but here it is. Load it manually via about:debugging.
You need to load a post by clicking on the date, and then you can click "bozo" or "block": the "bozo" just marks the post as someone being a "bozo" but doesn't block it. This is useful because everyone can have a bad day or whatever, and that's fine. It's people who consistently seem to be having "bad days" that are the problem – unfortunately there's a small group of highly prolific posters that I find consistently unpleasant, and with just ~20-30 people hidden like this (some of whom really ought to be banned IMHO) I found HN becomes a significantly better experience.
The main problem I have with this is that I can no longer flag or rebuff their posts (whichever may apply), so these people become the proverbial "missing stairs" if everyone starts doing it :-/
I do like the distinguishing factor between marking a commenter and blocking. I don't like (and think it's dangerous) to feel like blocking any old bad commenter over one comment is the go-to option, so having a way to self-warn myself if this is the same user before going nuclear is a nice touch.
>The main problem I have with this is that I can no longer flag or rebuff their posts (whichever may apply), so these people become the proverbial "missing stairs" if everyone starts doing it :-/
True, it is indeed a macro issue. But at the same time I feel it's a micro problem and there's a point where I need to look out for myself as opposed to the site at large. Let sleeping dogs lie, for now.