For what it’s worth, the last point in the commenting guidelines is this:

Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

There are some positive aspects, as it allows for more diversified opinions on various issues. I find that it is great that there are chicken farmers, bridge builders, etc on this platform. But I agree. There have been less and less articles on directly tech relating things, and more on general world news. Some of the things are important and worth posting, but HN has become a little bit of a general news aggregator.

On the one hand I totally agree, but on the other hand I also really enjoy reading what fellow HN-users think about the more diverse topics.

To be fair, people have been decrying this very same thing since the time I registered 8 years ago.

Perhaps a few tweaks can be made to the platform to help ensure HN's "core values" (that sounds silly) are passed on to new users. For the most part there's always been a good herd mentality to negate the one off low quality posts and a bit of public shaming "We don't talk like that around here...". Maybe a "Posting Guidelines" page and more weight added to the down-vote button to those that are privileged to have it could help.

I felt the same, recently I have a habit of clicking into user and see if they have only recently joined. I also notice a higher percentage of consumer hardware related news from various sources appearing on HN front page. It used to be only some real breakthrough, important announcement that gets the front page.

I have a simple solution. Old HNer should start downvoting rigorously. To show we have little tolerance on noise and HN isn't Reddit.

I think comment quality doesn't just depends on users but type of content that gets exposure too. I have always found that to understand most of submissions on hacker news you've to have some level of understanding and knowledge in technical fields. Same goes for comments. So hacker news will probably never become reddit and memey as long as we have great submissions and vigilant moderators.

Yes, this is an issue of anything popular. Not that it is a bad thing, as it keeps the community alive, but it feels "not the same" and might drive users away, like what happened on Facebook.

I think comment quality is still high. But over the last 18 months, I've noticed a lot of -- IDK -- partisan(?) votes.

Certain topics -- UBI, NN, GDPR, US vs EU politics -- seem to get comments upvoted/downvoted purely based on what side the comment supports, rather than the quality of the comment.

Honestly such subjects should not be in a technical blog/aggregator. The most successful forum I have ever seen only had two rules:

1) On topic (quantitative finance)

2) No politics, no religion

Politics and religion can come up when it comes to quanting, but there is no reason for them to, and raising these topics is purely destructive. There are plenty of places to go argue with someone about noise if you want to.

Right. 80% of the time, I don't even read the original article.

Not reading the article is an HN staple.