I have yet to see a popular forum or social news site or blog whose readers didn't all complain about the quality going down as it grew. Everyone seems to think that they're the last good member to join every community they're involved in.
Unpossible! I'M the last good member to join ;) But seriously, Matt is right. This sort of complaining happens to every community. The issue with HN is the 'audience' isn't the type that makes people a ton of money like Digg or Reddit. We're all pretty focused on only a few things here, and unless YC makes a play for the larger market it will stay that way.
I bet this audience has awesome demographics though. If PG wanted to monetize with some ads, I bet he'd be able to get a high CPM, especially if he had a survey done.
I suspect it's a bi-modal distribution. Which isn't good news for most advertisers, since the upper tier don't buy common things and the lower tier don't buy anything unless they have to...
Yes, there are the programmers who are making 6-figures, and then there are the ones who are stretching the pennies trying to get their startup off the ground.
The rich ones are too smart to buy just any random stuff you put in front of them and the poor ones are too busy trying to get rich to pay attention.
That's so ignorant that I would downmod it if I could. People with a lot of money buy stuff all the time, they're very desirable to advertisers for that reason. That's why LinkedIn gets CPM rates that are over 100x Facebook's.
