This concurs with my assessment. It's literally in the rules to not say what I'm about to say, but guess what: content-wise, HN threads are essentially Reddit t

This concurs with my assessment. It's literally in the rules to not say what I'm about to say, but guess what: content-wise, HN threads are essentially Reddit threads at this point (ironically this stupid rule has likely played a hand in helping this become possible). HN as a community used to heartily employ downvotes on comments that had low signal value. Those days are long gone; now you can make an offhand joke or pun and it will get upvoted to the moon. HN also used to track your ratio of karma per comment, which encouraged you to only comment when you really felt what you had to say was insightful lest you throw off your ratio with a comment that would only get a couple upvotes. Dang or somebody else removed that because they believed it was holding people back from participating (and it was, but it served a good purpose IMO). HN has long required a karma threshold to downvote, but IMO they should've hid the upvote behind an even higher karma requirement. Without that, what has happened when waves of new users sign up, is they upvote garbage comments (likely from other new accounts), and over time this becomes normalized to be the community voice. Leading to the low signal quality we have today.