The Bay Area/NYC and founder adjacent folks I know are mostly on group chats and messaging apps. Fundamentally the signal on this site is too low to be of use in those conversations. It's difficult to discuss decisionmaking in a forum full of random Fortune 100 employee deep in a torrid company hierarchy complaining about what their management hierarchy wants them to do.

There's also a tension between the increasing "community building" happening on HN and the Bay Area/NYC crowd. A lot of them have an extant community largely based on in-person relationships. The more HN builds its own community, the more you alienate this set of people. In other words, Slashdotification is happening more and more to HN where a set of very online tech people who don't really make decisions generate most of the chatter on this site.

The younger generation of founders meets in-person and uses iMessage and Instagram. The older generation meets in-person and uses iMessage, Signal, or WhatsApp.

The reality is, most people are in-person now and conversations that were happening on HN because of the pandemic are now being done offline.

Blind is toxic, but at least the users are cynically realistic.