Comment by fao_

Yeah. The Hacker News Guidelines say "No the website is not going downhill". But I can point to a shitton of threads from 2018 on often identical topics to threads today, where the quality of debate is quantitatively higher quality than it is today. Most of the people I know in Technology(tm) have not only stopped reading HN, but also derisively refer to it as The Orange Hellsite, because the quality of comments is often consistently worse than Reddit for comparable topics, these days.