So been here slightly longer and the only shift I can recall is a shift away from business to tech.
Early days had a lot more discussion about the business side of startups and vc. Then it started shifting more towards tech too the point now where startup/business discussion is mostly limited to Show/Ask posts.
Is this because many of the soft skills you mention were in flux/being 'disrupted' 15 years ago and since then they've become the accepted norm? I enjoyed that content too but feel like it was a time where startups were changing the face of how companies operated and now most businesses follow those models and they're not yet ripe for change again.
I honestly don't know. On the one hand you're right, we were in a time when startups were doing things like experimenting with holocracy. On the other hand, companies and cooperatives are still today experimenting with more efficient, equitable ways to get things done. I feel quite disappointed that so much of the anger over inequality in this community gets aimed at US or international politics rather than discussing things like corporate or cooperative structures which is both more grounded and more easy for many of us as practitioners to action.
To me it feels more emotional catharsis than intellectual discussion; getting mad at politics is getting mad at something you can't control and so is more of a way to air out your emotions. Getting mad at corporate structure or envisioning a cooperative is something we can control and requires more rigor to engage with.
The loss of chatter around the soft skills around tech (so business but also UI/UX design, design patterns, organizational approaches (like holocracy), planning processes, etc) has made HN a lot less interesting IMO. If I just wanted the usual tinfoil hat FOSS BOFH content, then I can go literally anywhere else. Reddit, Matrix, IRC, Telegram, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, they're all full of it.
Then there's the widening of scope to big social issues that's a different matter altogether.