The more popular a site is, the more enticing it becomes to those who are interested in marketing/manipulation/etc. To give credit where it's due, I think HN is far more resilient to these kinds of attacks than most other sites. But it's still important to keep in mind that these malicious actors do exist, and are attempting to influence your opinions.

Tech culture is changing. The generation that was primarily brought up around CS and engineering in academia and influenced by the counterculture of the 70s, Free Software and anarchism is being replaced by a tech culture raised by Silicon Valley techo-libertarianism, Reddit and 4chan. The Unabomber manifesto is far more influential on the politics of modern tech culture than the Hacker Manifesto. We've gone from hackers building the web to liberate the world from the gatekeepers of information and communication to hackers wanting to burn the web down because it's too mainstream.

That's a cultural schism that Hacker News hasn't been able to deal with.

It's correlated with the recent rise in Trump's polling. Left wingers who oppose lockdowns, cancel culture and the riots are being pushed towards the right.