In some ways growth has mitigated many of the effects listed in the article relative to the HN 2010.

1. Monolithic dominance of the front page by a single story appear to have been mitigated from some combination of algorithmic and human moderation. But it's still a problem because the threshold for the front page is higher and it feels as though fewer of those weird corner case articles have staying power. On the other hand, as always they tend to persist between 31-120 for several days. Today's abundance of Apple articles is nothing. In 2010 the whole front page would be covered with Apple articles every time a laptop got a CPU upgrade.

2. I'm biased, voting to express disagreement is just part of the franchise. A downvote to express it is often better than an 'I am appalled/upset/angry/argumentative' rebuttal. A downvote is just editorial feedback on the aesthetics of a comment. It comes from the audience of readers. It means the comment had an effect. If it wasn't the effect I wanted, then the problem was my writing - it's the only thing I control.

3. With growth, brand tribalism has diminished on HN. The center of brand consensus has largely moved away from Apple. If there is a halo company for which critical comments are seen as blasphemous on HN, at this point it's Google. I'm not of the opinion that the responses to anti-googlism on HN is organic rather than the effect of a social media team.

In the past four years, HN has clearly become more circumspect in regard to MicroSoft. The no-value cliches from the 80's and 90's are more likely to be as no-value cliches than a few years ago. HN is vastly more global, and Microsoft bashing is a sport originating in Silicon Valley. They're the company from Seattle, bootstrapped without Venture Capital to produce the richest founder ever. It's not a profitable model for Valley power brokers.

4. Everybody is out of touch. I can't say if there is more empathy on HN than before because I tend to avoid comment pages where I expect the expressions lacking empathy to dominate. On the other hand, if there is more it may be the result of highly focused business people becoming a lower proportion of HN's commenters. I want to be clear that the high levels of focus required to build a business are not inherently wrong. Building a business can be a distraction from broadly thinking about humanity. The converse is likewise true.

5. I should be doing something other than writing this. Some things haven't changed.

6. On average, this has never been the case. The comments on most blogs suck. A long thoughtful post is likely to draw 'Your mother' as a response. It's a high effort for low reward activity. The same is true for the site moderator. The cost of moving some comments to HN has always been outweighed by the otherwise unwritten thoughtful comments the are written for HN. HN consistently provides a larger audience interested in thoughtful comments and a pool of writers more likely to produce them. HN grows the market for high quality comments.

7. As a place to write, HN provides a large high quality readership. My blog doesn't, because it's about as good as my comments. That's typical for most blogs. That hasn't changed. I like the idea of going from blogging to writing essays though. That's really what good blog posts are.

HN is as good a place as any to post a numbered list of remarks.