HN comments changed from majority libertarian to majority socialist?

> What happened?

I used to work at a company that payed for Datadog. They seemed like a great business; they gave you an observability layer in exchange for a monthly fee. Great for a growing business, up until they started raising the prices and harassing our people with their sales team desperately begging for us to expand our package. I kid you not, after a few years of this the startup I worked for was paying Datadog more money per-month than the highest-paid salaries on the team. For graphs, we could show to executives. Later we switched to Promethius/Grafana and got the same functionality for pennies on the dollar.

My guess is that HN got their just-deserts; we spent the past 10-odd years enjoying a "disruptive" market that mostly created more problems for us. Now, everyone is realizing it's a raw deal. Startups and big businesses don't want to buy Software-as-a-Service if they're only going to extort their B2B patronage. Users don't want any more subscriptions and loathe the fact that modern technology resembles cable TV packages so closely. Developers are either ideologically committed to fixing a problem or ideologically committed to being paid; the overlap between these two attitudes has been grossly over-marketed.

When the dust settles, the brilliant expectation of competition in an unregulated market has not been realized in America. The most important and innovative flagship businesses are entirely stagnant, or even artificially walled-off from competition.

A better way of looking at it might be that comments became Reddit.

Sadly I just think this is what happens to anything good the larger the user base gets, but maybe I’m jaded

I joined HN around 2010 and thought it was highly libertarian then, I think it gradually became more representative of the general community since then.

There's a case now that monopoly power is what kills competition and prevents people from starting new businesses, see

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

where the author uses a very different language than "socialism" (e.g. state owns and controls the means of production which is distinct from "social democracy" which means you have private property but also food stamps, social security, universal health care, etc.) that emphasizes "liberty" from unfair markets, Stoller works with these guys

https://www.economicliberties.us/#

I don't think the comments have skewed more socialist (in the non-pejorative sense) particularly but there is definitely a lot less fawning optimism which I think is reflected in wider society. A lot of the way tech interfaces with modern life makes people unhappy no matter their political persuasion.

See now I see a lot of libertarian-ish and libertarian-ish-adjacent commentary on here and effectively nothing that could possibly be called socialist by anyone who wasn’t already way right of center, but then I also don’t see merely calling for regulation as being automatically socialist, especially in an environment in which unregulated scams are the norm (see the entire crypto space, for example) or when you’re talking about objectively harmful/predatory industries (petrochemicals, tobacco, patent pharmaceuticals, etc).

Segments of the US are drifting further toward socialism (not calling this good or bad or commenting on the size of those segments), so we can expect that to be reflected on HN.

leopards ate my face

> or is this AI generated commentary

Seriously?

> Now most articles I see have wall to wall pro socialist and pro regulation comments. What happened?

Interest rates went >0% and people realized they were being f-ed by the techbros and capitalism in general.

I have noticed this too. I suspect as HN grew, it caught the attention of bad actors that want to drive a particular narrative and they actively run campaigns that utilize both paid shills and bots.