He was active, but the reason his karma is so high is that everyone has an upvote spasm when they see PG comment.

He has small kids. I stopped being active for a few years when my kids were born. It's natural.

Well, the quality of the discussions on HN have taken a dive dramatically since about a year and a half. So maybe he just doesn't feel theres much to comment these days.

From my perspective, from a very humble position, the content on this site seems to skew toward the "harder" science problems lately, a far cry from when 5 out of the top 10 stories were RoR related and many other stories were related to pushing CSS and JS to the extreme with a smattering of stories about startups and people hitting it big or failing.

I think we have since learned about the influence of survivor bias, that you can really accomplish the same things in any programming language and that since YC itself is now focusing on larger problems, some with sociological and political leanings, that it is best to move on from looking at things at the code level and instead look at the bigger picture.

A year and a half? Hmm, I think that's about the time I've been more active on HN. Sorry about that.

People have been saying that for the entire 6 years I've been reading HN.

Perhaps that is because it has been declining for the entire 6 year period.

If you fit the curve, HN was perfect about 14 months before it was created.

Those were the days!

Isn't that true of all software?

Concern over the decline of HN reached a head ~5.5 years ago.

Has it? I've seen comments such as this for a few years now, but I didn't notice the decline myself.

Some of the political arguments would -never- have been tolerated in the early years. Users and moderators would have quickly suppressed them...but they seem to have infested the forum since then.

100 times this. There needs to be a coordinated effort to stamp out all political material on HN so we can focus on actual Hacker News and not the Silicon Valley political sphere.

I was away for awhile...came back and was shocked at the level of political bickering and posts that were allowed to stay. A lot of the old members have moved on, it's a different place these days. Such is life.

Forums tend to become fragmented over time because as the number of active users increases, the diversity of the opinions of the community increases. Such increased diversity results in an increase in opposing viewpoints, which drives users away and increases the frequency of political in-fighting.

There are no moderation tools at present which can prevent this sort of in-fighting with blatant censorship.

In the absence of such tools, the only viable solution is a fragmentation of the community. This is most apparent to HN readers with the rise of lobste.rs

I think around the election it was pretty political, and some of the discussion was pretty, uh, heated. It's calmed down again.

They said that a year and a half ago.

I would wager that he wanted to distance himself from the increasingly negative / toxic "community".