I don't really agree with this. I think HN gets a pretty decent mix of all political viewpoints, just based on the percentage of times I see stuff that I agree with (politically) and the times I don't. If anything, the thing I really like is the stuff that feels blatantly tribal one way or the other is still consistently downvoted. To your specific points:
1. "as its user base aged from young, hungry, hopeful entrepreneurs to jaded senior engineers or VPs in large fortune 500 companies" I think that's a vast, and honestly unfair, over-simplification. I think a lot of folks have become genuinely disillusioned, and it really has nothing to do with changing with age (heck, if anything, I see young people as being more disillusioned than I am). For example, not speaking so much of any political change, but I certainly vastly underestimated how effective the Internet and social media would be as a tool of division. And I personally have some regret of some jobs I had that made this situation worse.
2. As HN has become more popular I've seen a large influx of more right leaning viewpoints. Of course, I think that's probably just because I consider myself more left/centrist, so it's hard for me to say if there has been a real change in direction, but I think I have seen more just blatant political takes, but again I still see informative, quality comments still bubble to the top most frequently.
1. "as its user base aged from young, hungry, hopeful entrepreneurs to jaded senior engineers or VPs in large fortune 500 companies" I think that's a vast, and honestly unfair, over-simplification. I think a lot of folks have become genuinely disillusioned, and it really has nothing to do with changing with age (heck, if anything, I see young people as being more disillusioned than I am). For example, not speaking so much of any political change, but I certainly vastly underestimated how effective the Internet and social media would be as a tool of division. And I personally have some regret of some jobs I had that made this situation worse.
2. As HN has become more popular I've seen a large influx of more right leaning viewpoints. Of course, I think that's probably just because I consider myself more left/centrist, so it's hard for me to say if there has been a real change in direction, but I think I have seen more just blatant political takes, but again I still see informative, quality comments still bubble to the top most frequently.