I am with you and this shift is totally alarming. I've seen the pendulum swing slowly, the frog boiling slowly. Now, top comments are about curbing speech which is just insane even in the worst possible interpretation of social media effects.

This is not an HN phenomenon. NYT/WaPo and the left machine is operating on anti-free speech mode right now in combination with Big Corporate + ESG. (See Cloudflare and Kiwifarms issue recently).