This sentement has come up semi-frequently in the past (almost) four years I've been a member of the site, and I lurked for months prior to creating an account. From my perspective, the site has trended towards mass appeal, but not at a very quick pace. The articles on the front page today aren't all that different from the ones I remember being on there four years ago. The level of discourse ebs and flows. Sometimes it's really good; other times it isn't.

Yes, thinking about the wave of change over the past year or so makes me sad.

Even more sad are the periodic proposals to "improve" (i.e. fix) HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5042403

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488561

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4399108

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404718

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842554

And PG randomly chimes in throughout.. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920

And then there is the complaining: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747

None of these things seem to be working very well. They may alleviate a portion of the pain temporarily, but the baseline level of quality throughout the community still feels way off to me compared to what I see in the old threads.

As a sidenote, I like the explanations in this post about why digg, reddit, and slashdot went sour:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178514

interesting!

i saw this in one of the posts: http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

looks like a good intermediate step.