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The right-wing spent a couple of years demonizing mask policies, and the major talking point was that masks didn’t work. You don’t need that many people to flag-kill a story and there’s far more than that number who will go to the grave not admitting they were wrong.
In that case HN has finally strayed from its "hacker ethos" and objectively wanting to find out about any system over time at least; truth. Eventually right (even) in online discussions? No more. OK.

Maybe I've been thinking about this forum too highly for too long already? Probably.

Could this be another potential signal for the trend of the attention economy's created culture taking over in this turbulent and in many ways regressive global state?

If so, this is starting to feel "on rails". Scary.

I think of it as a consequence of the field expanding and becoming a high-income profession: with more people in total, regression to the mean is going to inevitably show up and the hyper-focus on capitalism bleeds through in many places. Mask mandates were proclaimed to be bad for business so a certain level of opposition is largely baked in.
It's been veering that way for years.

Moderation has some huge blind spots that's allowed a corrosive element to build a core in the community. But that's the fate of all social networks. We've yet to figure out how to scale social interaction. When a network gets large enough to grant relative anonymity to people, the worst comes out.