Why number of upvotes is much higher these days?

I’m not sure if there are publicly available stats but my first guess is that there are more users migrating from Reddit, probably because they’re not happy with the demographic shift.

Anecdotally I think you also see:

1. An increase is Ask HN posts that a short time ago wouldve only been on Stack Overflow

2. An increase in low quality meme comments that a short time ago wouldve only been on Reddit

That leads me to believe that HN is one of the last the safe harbours for tech minded folks as SO and Reddit continue to decline in quality.

I have noticed that HN is much slower during the day than in the past; higher traffic would correspond to more voting activity and articles getting significantly more upvotes than, say, a year or two ago.

observational data points aren't a great measure, In any average within a large set of data, there's always a chance to see extreme highs and extreme lows. Unless you have something more than based on perception or observation, you're making a large assumption that it's actually occurring.

Not writing this to attack you so please don't take it personal. Just sharing my thoughts.

I think that points have a correlation with votes but other things probably contribute to points in addition to votes.