I was browsing the archives of NH the other day and I noticed the quality of most comments to be the pretty much about the same. Similar proportion of off topic or just replying to the title style comments. The length of the comments seemed longer now compared to back in the day. There were a similar number of joke / pun / silly comments which didn't get upvoted. I think there were less lame/mean/snarky comments in the past. I didn't see as much flame.

Would be great to see some actual data analysis.