I don't know why people are down-voting you. Some people might not like it, but you simply cannot maintain the quality this site has enjoyed over the past several years as we continue to take on a mess of new users. Most of the new users simply don't fall into the hacker/entrepreneur category (as past polls have clearly indicated). They're just people coming from Reddit or wherever who want a "better" experience. Most of the articles on the 'newest' page are about crap like WebOS and #superbowl and politics and you name it. HN will in fact go the way of all previous communities as it takes on hoards of people who don't care about the original intent of this site.

I think that PG will be able to take the quality as high as today, for a very simple reason, he does not reason in terms of pageviews for this site, and will be willing to do all the needed changes, even if this will upset the "wrong" part of the user base, to take quality high. So at max the new rules will have the effect of reducing again the user base to the original one. Otherwise if this does not happen, there will be a next HN site somewhere and we'll switch again. slashdot -> programming.reddit.com -> HN -> ?

I don't think there is anything he can do to prevent what some users consider the decline of HN. He's just not that heavy-handed. He could easily go in a kill every shit article day in and day out, but it's not in his interest to do so. As HN is a vehicle for exposure of YC startups the continued increase of users on HN is only to his benefit. That isn't to say that this is why he started the site, but it's certainly a huge benefit to him. You simply don't #1 every piece of YC startup news on Reddit. :)

I agree with you that eventually something else will come out and we will flock there to get away from HN once it gets to the point where it's mostly fluff articles about Apple and politics.

Yes it makes sense that even in the case of a not real 'startup' as HN it still is too valuable to perform drastic actions. Thanks for sharing your point of view.

This would imply that when dig had 1 million page views was like HN, that is not the case. So I think your claim is flawed ;)

Digg used to be a great place for programming-related news. It was the place for a good programming news when it came out. Why? Because its community was populated by programmers. Over the years the programming section on Digg became desolate and ignored as the programmers sought refuge from the lolcats and poor discussion. A similar thing is happening to Reddit as people want to move somewhere that isn't dominated by discussion comprised of witty comments and mostly high-level tech news.

Strange, I spent some time in dig back when it was created and I never saw this level of quality like in HN. Was much more slashdot-alike.

I was also an old-school Digg user, and you're right, it never compared to what HN is. However, the way Digg declined (and how all communities eventually decline) as a result of an influx of new users with disparate interests is the same.