And that kind of problem underlies a growing issue with HN. >As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that t

And that kind of problem underlies a growing issue with HN. >As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening. There has always been a push for maintaining quality but more and more users are ignoring everything on this page. In your case that would mean that there's not only a growing amount of people who are downvoting who they disagree with but also that those users are getting a significant amount of karma. The theory is that by the time someone has enough karma to downvote posts they are already trustworthy to vote for content that adds to the discussion, this is starting to break down and it's only going to get worse.