Personally for me, before during and after the quarantine my use of HN has pretty much remained the same, I work with computers (like most of us here) and I check HN when I get a little bit of down-time, like while waiting for something to compile or waiting for a file to get transferred or something to finish installing,only thing that changed was during the quarantine I was working from home, the number of hours I worked, the nature of work I do and how I do that work remained pretty much the same.

So, I am guessing this is pretty much what happened to most of us as well? And therefore for a majority of HN users, our HN browsing habits probably stayed the same?

in short, HN readers were already living in de facto quarantine pre quarantine

Let me fix that : In short, HN readers were already living in the future pre quarantine. Basically applying one of PG maxims in "How to Get Startup Ideas"[0]: "Live in the future, then build what's missing."

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

I am genuinely curious of what triggered the downvote. It makes me feel as if I didn't express myself correctly. If anyone has an idea ?

it was less relevant than my comment, which was already not very relevant.

Thanks for your reply ! Well, I found your comment extremely relevant, and delivered in a very succint (albeit tongue in cheek ) way.

A greater share of the HN readership was already having a quarantine friendly work/lifestyle, than the general population. Due to underlying macro-trends (technology, mobile consumer internet, entrepreneurship...).

And one of these macro-trends, the fragility of our hyper-reactive interconnected world, was illuminated by the covid crisis. I will try to reach you on twitter, to not pollute this thread further.

i doubt it really matters

for the record i did not downvote you.

It’s possible that the moderators tweaked some knobs to control the rates of submission, the rise to the front page, the time on the front page, etc. Not that they did it individually, but there could be more added mechanisms this year. Maybe they will respond and provide some insights.

Here's a hypothesis. I have no idea if it's true:

HN users tend to be in relatively well protected employment with regard to lockdown, i.e. either already remote, or as software devs / white collar workers who can easily deal with the switch to remote, including the costs.