alt Hacker NewsThis wasn't the case in the older thread. I've seen you mention that you think HN hasn't changed that much but I think juxtaposing this comment thread against the older one is illuminating. HN has drifted more toward a general news site than anything particular special. Like most news sites, comments are characterized by short, overly emotional comments that argue in borderline bad faith. Comments aren't particularly interested in discussion but instead just cathartic emoting.
From characteristics of HN that I can observe directly (stories making the front page, sites represented, classifications of those sites), relatively little change.
Mind, that's what a two-year-old historical scrape of the front-page alone shows.
What I don't see in that is voting behaviour, submissions overall, stories which haven't made the front page, etc., etc., etc. Much of that is only available within the HN server/DBMS itself, though some might be evident from a more comprehensive scrape of the site. Since items (submissions and comments) are assigned monotonically-increasing IDs, that's at least theoretically possible, though at 42.8 million items and counting it'd take some doing, and there is still a great deal of information concealed from the public: comment votes, purged content, flag detail, vouch detail, unannounced moderator activity.
What has changed markedly is the pardonee's relationship to the political system, and the political system's own degree of (dis)functionality. To that extent, HN both reflects, participates, and is a mechanism for influencing / being influenced by a larger system which has changed markedly.
HN has long been unable to discuss contentious subjects. It's particularly prone to status quoism, and in the present environment, the status quo is markedly authoritarian, fascistic, and personality-cultish, all of which HN's biases inherently (if not intentionally) support.
It disappoints me tremendously, as for all those faults HN remains one of the better online discussion sites. The bar is falling rapidly however, so cold, cold comfort there.
Late edit: Specifically as regards general news sites, those have always featured heavily on HN, with the New York Times specifically being among the top 3, if not the top submitted site. That changed markedly around 2019 not due to changes in HN, but as the Times significantly tightened its paywall, causing front-page appearances to drop to roughly 1/4 their previous quantity. To that extent, HN sees less general news, and less reasonably nonpartisan news now than in its first decade or so. The degree to which social media sites, and Twitter in particular, have themselves shifted rightwards, there's also a strong bias.
Specifically partisan "think tank" (read: propaganda) sites have long had a submission penalty, and don't seem to be more prevalent so far as I've checked. Partisanship has crept up on other sites/domains, however.