As somebody who has been here since near the beginning, I'd say my subjective observations are: 1. Yeah, sure, there's been some change in the sentiment / zeit

As somebody who has been here since near the beginning, I'd say my subjective observations are: 1. Yeah, sure, there's been some change in the sentiment / zeitgeist of HN, but I haven't seen any particularly marked change in overall quality of the discussion. 2. There are good days, better days, and not-so-good days as far as how much stuff shows up that is of interest to me. It's always been that way. 3. Our interests and focus do change as we age, and to the extent that HN (or Slashdot, or Reddit, or LtU, or LWN, etc.) is more or less interesting to me now than 15 years ago is almost certainly a function of both changes in the external environment AND changes in me. I'd guess that's true for most everybody. 4. HN is still one of the best sites on the net (if not the best) for discussing interesting topics around (technology|business|science). So even if it has declined, I don't find that it's declined enough to say any other site is particularly better. Lobste.rs is interesting, but the population there is a lot smaller which is both good and bad in its own way. 5. There don't seem to be as many "celebrity hackers" posting these days. Back in the day we had pg, rtm, and quite a few other very notable figures posting, which was kinda neat. And there are still some of those. WalterBright for example (the creator of D) posts quite often from what I've seen. But it does seem like there are fewer of those guys posting now than in the past. Whether that's important or not is a subject to debate I suppose.