Personally I haven't noticed a huge drop in quantity, if any at all. The tech related posts are still as good as they were before, and the politics posts are still as much of a disaster as they were before.

And the latter's kind of just a politics thing in general; everywhere you can even think of discussing it will either become an echo chamber or a shouting match.

I feel the community "quality" has always been pretty low and hive mindy.

How can it be true that the community is a hive mind, but also that every discussion is a (sometimes 5-layer-deep) argument? If it were a hive mind, wouldn't there be little argument at all?

There is no argument when the opinions being expressed are not of the hive mind it gets downvoted and flagged. You never see dissenting opinions because they're removed from the site.

What is HN’s most natural comparison? Slashdot? They are less nice, as smart, with a lot more 4chan going on now days.

I thought there might have been a quality dip when quarantines picked up steam in the US. Isolation or boredom might weaken some users’ internal filter that normally protects the site from mediocre comments.

The tech posts are mostly good - politics are too US-centric, no surprise. Quality of comments going down, for sure. There's an abundance of "libertarian" views. Make of that what you will, but when you see it enough, you know the conversation here is dominated by a lot of young techies spending most of their days in a bubble.

No

Also dropping from search appearance, maybe that's why they changed the beta.