http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=522675
2008 Summer Demo Day - 587 days ago (First comment = snarky remark about the company logos... sound familiar?):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=276333
2007 Demo Day - 957 days ago (Half the thread is [dead] and full of bickering similar to this one):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269
So no, HN did not ever do better. It only seems worse because instead of 2 complaints about company logos, HN is now 10x the size and you see 20 complaints. There's still a lot of great articles posted, HN "Ask/Tell" discussions, and it's still full of intelligent people. However, it takes wisdom to know when to shut one's mouth, and intelligence != wisdom.
I've been here about 3 years myself, and that's why I try to stay logged out and make my bookmark to HN = /best. It's just gotten far too noisy and I was wasting tons of time keeping up with the sheer volume of (both good and bad) comments.
There's a new batch of YC startups every 6 months. The startups were about the same quality a year ago. And yet after demo day a year ago the top comment on HN wasn't a content-free dismissal with 86 points. I know both HN and the startups very well, and what's changing here is HN, not the startups. The site has grown so much that the median user is significantly dumber and meaner than a year ago.
I've been thinking a lot over the last several months about how to deal with this. One of the solutions I'm considering is to get rid of points on comments, and that would have worked well here. Fnid2's comment, as he more or less admitted himself, was just a throwaway remark. But displaying points transformed it into a rallying cry leading a mob.