I've been on this site since 2010. Yes the quality was higher back then, however all communities eventually regress to the mean - you can't avoid it. The thing

I've been on this site since 2010. Yes the quality was higher back then, however all communities eventually regress to the mean - you can't avoid it. The thing is though, relative to other areas of the internet, the quality of discourse is still much much higher than average, and until memes and witty retorts become common in the comments, I feel like it's still going to be a place of good discussion for a long time to come. The political commentary and "hot take" Substack self-promoters is an issue but we have tools for those. If you want more focused tech, visit lobste.rs and other sites in that circle, but note that those sites have issues in the same vein. If you want my personal opinion, I don't think there's much different between the population here today, and 10 years ago. It's merely that back then there were much fewer people, and stories lasted much longer on the front page, so people had a longer time to comment on esoteric postings about Erlang behavior, or someone's implementation of LISP. Now, a post about a person's fun project might barely touch front page and then fall down rapidly, because there's just so many other articles posted by other community members.