Yeah. I’d like to avoid a cliché “this forum has changed over time and that is bad!!!” argument - but it definitely does feel like the tone of many discussions is different. I find myself rolling my eyes in frustration and being taken in by it way too often. It’s up for debate if that’s a change in the discussion, or a change in me.

I’ve taken to trying to just immediately click “hide” on any article I see on the homepage that sounds like it might get anywhere near anything controversial - removing the temptation to engage unconstructively completely. And the same with comments to some extent - if there’s a culture-war trigger-phrase in a comment, just hide the tree and move on.

That’s getting harder though - I wouldn’t have expected an article about Netflix subscriber growth to end up with a bunch of top-level comments about “woke politics ruining tech”, for example. It’s often kind for hard to avoid even if you are trying.

And it’s not like “politics” as a subject could be dismissed either. The thing is that articles about Musk buying Twitter or Google making controversial auto-correct suggestions or whatever are inherently both tech and politics. I don’t know how you avoid that - but the atmosphere definitely makes me want to avoid participating all together.