I do realize HN trends are unreliable. As a few others who replied, it felt peculiarly acute in this thread, but my impression was not based merely on this thread, but on several such 'huh' moments in the past two years. While HN always felt somewhat heterogeneous and still does, compared to 7-10 years ago, to me it feels that there is relatively more science contrarianism or even denialism with regards to climate, vaccination, etc., more subthreads derailing into religion because someone justified some strongly held position upthread using religion and more socially/culturally conservative attitudes. These are things which for lack of a better term I labeled a rightward trend in the USA sense of the word. In my unreliable memory, I remember HN being mainly economically right leaning and culturally left leaning which mirrors the corporate environment which found it much easier and cheaper to gain good will points that way. In retrospect, the pandemic feels kinda like an inflexion point (both HN wide and society wide).
I also have a limited POV into HN, for example I never really looked at the Launch HN threads (for the simple reason that most focus on the USA, at least in early stages, while I am in eastern EU) so I never really got those data points. With no real data and just remembered personal anecdotes is is hard for me to tell if this was merely an illusion or things haven't changed but I have become more aware of these aspects or whether the trend is real. Others in this subthread have proposed explanations for the trend and I think several theories can be found both society wide and HN wide. But while we do have some evidence the trend is real society wide, I thought it worth checking if the it is true HN wide before hypothesising explanations. Also, (compared to FB for example which we know captured a certain cohort and is aging along with it) with HN allowing easy account creation and throwaway accounts I think it is hard to accurately measure how well the HN sample reflects the population of society at large (we do at least know there is a heavy US-centric bias for obvious reasons).
I wish there was a reliable political alignment text classifier I could use to science this.
I am disappointed to see some have interpreted this inquiry on my part as me trying to police the thread.