I'd be wary of drawing correlations like this. The people who commented on that thread are not going to be the same people commenting on this one. The topic isn't even the same; in the first thread the topic is his sentencing, and in this its his pardon.

The attraction for people to post on Hacker News is mainly to complain, and so in the first you get complaints the sentencing is too harsh, and in this one you get complaints that he shouldn't have been pardoned. Its not necessarily a cultural shift, just an artifact of the types of discussions people have online.

> Very striking to see how the sentiment has drastically shifted

I'm not sure. I have two questions on that. Is there the appearance of a sentiment shift? I see plenty of people arguing both against and for incarcerating him in both this thread and that old one.

And then if there is an appearance of a sentiment change (which I'm not sure about) is that evidence of a sentiment change or just selection bias? People who are okay with an outcome are much less likely to write a comment than people who are upset. That alone would change the bias of the comments.

Can you explain the differences you see? People found the sentence too harsh at the time, too, it looks like.

To suggest there hasn't been a cultural shift is insane, imo.

I wouldn't argue that both sides have gotten more extreme, rather the political spectrum curve has flattened. There is much less rational discourse in general.

Reddit is a great example. Even 10 years ago you could have mostly rational discussions. Now its no better than Facebook. I saw a post today about people being upset the government is giving OpenAI half a trillion dollars. They didn't even realize it wasn't government money. They didn't want to be corrected.

As someone who's been following this since the beginning, the most striking difference is the assumption that Ross was in fact the DPR ordering hits, which he repeatedly denied. Obviously, he could be lying, but that's the main question for me. Since people now assume he was the one and only DPR (I wonder if people didn't get the concept from The Princess Bride), they assume DPR chat logs where murder-for-hire occurred must have been him as well.

Both threads seem to share a similar sentiment: he should not serve much time for the drug marketplace but should for the murders-for-hire. There's just a difference in how many people believe those allegations and to what extent they should factor into the sentence given the charges were dropped despite the allegations almost certainly being true.

Seems kinda the same to me?

This debate about IQ could have been had yesterday, and I‘m pretty sure I saw a pretty similar debate a few months ago on this site. Not much has changed there at least.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629493

I guess people feel ten years in prison was adequate punishment.

It seems like the same set of arguments to me.

Most interesting post here. A good indicator of the real change in HN readership over the years. For the worse IMO.

What I don't understand is why Donald Trump, of all people, is being lenient on drug traffickers.

Yes, by cultural shift if you mean, moral bankruptcy.

I see the same arguments: too harsh, not harsh enough, he tried to have people murdered, etc.

The facts are: Trump now does NTF and coinschemes himself and got talked into this by his new entourage. That is what most people here complain about.

And he does this to distract from the fact that he will not stop the Ukraine war, not stop H1B etc.

Many of the same people also complain about the Biden laptop and Biden's pardons.

life in prison was too harsh, but a full pardon is too lenient.

Reddit started off libertarian in its early days and has since gone radically far left. And similarly, HN has slowly drifted further and further left.

%-wise there are just fewer libertarian-minded people here these days.

yes, HN is becoming increasingly hyperpartisan and not even in a very interesting way

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