I respect your awareness of that, which I'm sure is much broader than mine is. HN consumes my attention; I'm all depth and no breadth.

What I'm interested in is how well HN does at fulfilling its own mandate in its own terms. On that scale, it's getting worse—in this respect, at least, which is a big one. We're going to do something about it, the same way we've always tried to stave off the decline of this place (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

If you're right that the phenomenon is affecting other places even more than HN then I guess we get to be the-worst-internet-forum-except-for-all-the-others even more than before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494318, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) - not a bad outcome for HN, though I think it might be overly optimistic.

> On that scale, it's getting worse...

I don't mean to express doubt (you would know better than I) but what makes you say that?

Do you think it's a consequence of external factors like the current political climate or of internal factors like HN getting larger?

I think it's both external and internal, but the internal factors are more important because a compromised immune system is more vulnerable to outer pathogens.

I'm not sure it's about HN getting larger, though. It's a bit hard to tell, but at least some of the upswing in cynical and curmudgeonly comments is coming from established users.