I was a bit surprised myself, but after thinking about it - the discussions under the Twitter stories that I’ve seen on the front page have mostly rapidly deteriorated to the point of being pretty unedifying for everyone.
That’s not surprising, since it’s a story that meets at the intersection of tech, business, politics, and controversial public figures. There are quite a lot of strong views on it, and in my experience this community doesn’t tend to deal in a particularly adult way with events like that.
That kind of discussion usually sinks pretty quickly - I assume mostly because of the algorithm down-ranking overheated discussions. Then you have the general leaning of HN towards a bit of a libertarian, counter-mainstream narrative - it’s not hard to see that the pattern you describe being a natural outcome of all that, no shadowy motives required.
It kinda sucks to be honest, because from many different perspectives it’s absolutely gigantic news with lots of really interesting stuff to think and talk about.
That’s not surprising, since it’s a story that meets at the intersection of tech, business, politics, and controversial public figures. There are quite a lot of strong views on it, and in my experience this community doesn’t tend to deal in a particularly adult way with events like that.
That kind of discussion usually sinks pretty quickly - I assume mostly because of the algorithm down-ranking overheated discussions. Then you have the general leaning of HN towards a bit of a libertarian, counter-mainstream narrative - it’s not hard to see that the pattern you describe being a natural outcome of all that, no shadowy motives required.
It kinda sucks to be honest, because from many different perspectives it’s absolutely gigantic news with lots of really interesting stuff to think and talk about.