Usenet was incredible before the eternal September. There was noise, trolls, flame wars and mentally instable people and good and bad moderation decisions, but the good was really good. Party due to the higher quality of the users and from the inability to make money from it. Top people were reading and lurking in relevant newsgroups and commented sometimes or sent private comment via email.

HN has two things common with Usenet, good moderation and higher than average users. What has changed is the motives. There are many users who are self promoting or marketing with pseudo-informative submissions. They push blog posts that are just written to increase visibility and "what I experienced when doing business", many of those stories made up. With all this negative stuff, HN has still good singal/noise ratio and you can learn from comments and discussions.