I can't suggest that we try upping the "super deep"/"good intro or midlevel" stuff ratio, since there are always new people floating around who need to see this content to learn about it. And there are still plenty of good deep articles that float through here.

I work in a college department, I watch grad students come in each year, and the best graduate and move on. I have come to realize that it is just a necessary function of community to have to go through the "boring" set of discussions to get the new folks up to speed. These are more or less always the same. Its after the intro stuff that new and interesting things are taught, and the perception of the pace slows down. New stuff has been happening at the same rate forever, its just that "new to me" stuff has started to approach the "actually new" stuff rate. This can lead to quality seeming to go down.

I think this is true of every "kids these days are less worldly" article and the oft heard "favorite music/newspaper/other media isn't as good as it used to be." The world hasn't gotten dumber, you've just gotten better taste, and better at spotting bullshit that has always been there.

Or is it "now you have thousands of applicants who would have never joined if YC didn't required it." (sic)

For clarification, per PG:

"The first thing I notice when I look at an application is the username it was submitted under. If it's one I recognize for making thoughtful comments on Hacker News, I give the application extra attention."

http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html

So I can fully understand that while joining HN is not a dejure requirement to getting accepted to YC it certainly seems like a defacto requirement based on the above statement.

No one's complaining "too many usernames are taken"; people are complaining about the comment quality.

When you get a HN username to make a YC application, you're going to be hyperaware that you're here visiting pg's home turf. You'll either try really hard to post high-content, insightful comments, or you'll simply lurk. Either way, you're not likely to be wandering around urinating on the furniture.

tl;dr -- the requirement seems more likely to boost, rather than harm, comment quality - if it has any effect at all.

2007. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.

2008. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.

2009. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.

2010. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.

2011. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more.

2012. edw519, too busy building to comment. Community: Where have all the old timers gone?

Would any old-timer care to use the open-source HN code and create a vintage HN by automatically inviting anyone with an age of >N days?

Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271

Personally I've been here for 1472 days (3.5 years) and on the leaderboard for much of that time. I feel like the quality has gone through several up-and-down cycles, though some of that is probably because my tastes have changed too. Overall it feels much as it did several years ago.

The problem is not only the home page ranking: it's the discussions. I see a lot of low-quality (as in "it's more important to be right than it is to debate in civilized ways") discussions. I did not correlate that to account age.

2024 days here @wensing, No.

Being here a long time doesn't confer any special status. All it really shows is curiosity and early adoption. Other than having seen a wider range of technology, topics, discussion and behaviour the one thing I've noted is the number of high ranking stories sans comments.

I'd really like to can articles limited to point threshold with no comments. No comments, no value & shouldn't get the chance to go up the story leader board.

You already can. Just randomly pick a low item id, ie: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20111 and follow up the comments to the article head ie: "How to Build a Web 2.0 Dating Site in 66.5 Man-Hours " http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19988

The sig/noise was different, fewer higher qual comments.

Sorry about that ... back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Secondly, I know your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but that would actually be a very appropriate age cut-off for what strikes me as a remarkably elitist endeavor.

TBH I'm fascinated to know how the community would differ from HN of 4 years ago, since all the older participants would be 4 years more experienced in life and hacking.

http://pivoted.co/

  def cutoff():
    return min([leader.age for leader in get_leaders("http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders")]

However, that really doesn't answer the problem when you don't define what a leader is. If it's the highest amount of Karma past 7 days, then the youngest leader could even be a day old user. Please respond with solutions, not http wrappers.

As people point out, HN may not have changed as much as people think it has. But it certainly wouldn't hurt to set the tone in the right direction in case there's any chance it has.

To much dumb posts about something insignificant by somebody in SV or YC that are not interesting to me.

I do think that's their good right, to make their "own" new community ofcourse:) but then we have to look to other sources for quality tech & startup news.

Back to whether the articles and comments on HN, as of late, are elevated enough to trigger intellectual gratification... to believe that after 1883 days, you've changed because you've soaked up all you can and must move on, is a disservice to yourself and to HN. If not HERE, then WHERE? It is the responsibility of our seasoned users, particularly like you, to keep the morale and the quality of this site as high as possible. Plus, users like you are what make this site valuable. You (and users like you) are the adequate benchmark beside which we can measure the quality of the articles. Moreover, the world of knowledge is a vast and limitless ocean, much of which (I'm sure) still remains for you to be discovered. And the nature of this web site and what it is intended for still works. All that needs to be done is to match the growth of the audience by growing the material proportionately. This proposal to use karma as currency makes a lot of sense. Before, the karma was meaningless anyway. This structure puts the karma to good use and forces everyone to contribute mindfully. Cheers to the original poster. I hope it's implemented.

For the original users, who were charmed by the fact that "everybody has (more or less) the right opinion, and we can discuss rather than argue!" this can be a shock, but I'd venture that it's often actually a rather healthy thing, even if you unfortunately also get more trolls and flamers along the way. Pleasant as it is to talk with one's close peers, one can often learn more by talking to people one disagrees with...

It can go bad, of course, but HN certainly doesn't seem to show the usual symptoms of an internet cesspool; based on my short time on HN (~1 year), the S/N ratio isn't bad at all.

But it'd probably be too difficult to truly blind it; posts would reference startups or frameworks that didn't exist five years ago, or Obama, or other anachronistic events.

One of the best parts to me is the data is already stored and it has a very high cardinality, so it would work exceptionally well as an indexed field.

But: move on to where?