I think there're 3 reasons for the (perceived) degradation: 1. There's a significant increase in the number of submissions over time while the number of frontp

I think there're 3 reasons for the (perceived) degradation: 1. There's a significant increase in the number of submissions over time while the number of frontpage articles remains the same (30). This leads to shorter articles lifespan. So if you visit HN as often as I do in a day, you will encounter a lot more good articles and also a lot more bad ones (the good to bad ratio may be the same, but our brain doesn't compute ratio intuitively, so it just gives more weigh to the majority bad articles). Note that 'bad' here just means stuffs I don't find interesting. 2. Wider range of topics (kind of related to the first point). So any given veteran will be less happy now that there are more articles that won't interest them. 3. Points inflation as the result of more users. 2-3 years ago, an article with score above 50 points is decent, now they're so common (may be a points exchange calculator to convert current score to score x days ago? ;-) )