"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)" - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Who's to say that will still be an illusion in three years?

ahem, not the best measuring device, regardless

my account is less than a year old yet I attended Startup School 2006.

passwords get lost, hard drives fail

HN is turning into reddit.

Seems like a natural progression; after all Reddit's transformation into a combination of Digg and 4chan is nearly complete.

Not a really useful guideline. Just because my account is new doesn't mean I haven't been reading HN for awhile. I just never felt like commenting here.

Agreed, it's not a useful guideline. It's creating a truth out of thin air: "HN is not turning into Reddit."

EDIT: I'm getting downvoted for this but I think I'm bringing up a valid point. "HN is not turning into Reddit" is taken to be true a priori and the guidelines call for us not to question this. This seems to go counter to the general spirit of HN of allowing intelligent discussion and opposing points of view. (However, if a comment merely says "HN is turning into Reddit" it's not valuable; it should go into more detail and contribute something new and useful.)

No, it isn't. It's stating that claims that HN is turning into Reddit when authored specifically by people with newer accounts are less likely to be valuable. It's almost a direct corollary that long-term HN users have enough perspective that their complaints about the decline of HN's quality are at least potentially worthy of consideration.

Touche. Good point.

Well, you're not bringing up a valid point. You see, HN is not turning into Reddit. The guideline is not creating a truth, it's stating a fact that has been true and remains true.

why does this comment get hammered??

with the implosion of Digg, there has been an influx of users from digg to reddit and here, and surely from reddit to here.

trolls roll downhill, so to speak.

so why when a user asks what's going on with HN, the comment gets hammered? or is it the trolls doing the hammering.

I made a similar comment recently and it got just as quickly crushed.

something is awry at HN and some of us care. surely, the growth is good and there will be all types but shooting the messenger only proves the negative point.

I'm guessing it was downvoted because the comment didn't have much substance and didn't further the discussion.

You forgot to add:

"and not because it appears incendiary to suggest that the HN community may be changing for the worse."

That'd make for a convincing argument.