The "upmod only" strategy of this site is now getting tested... What that means is that the old guard have no power to enforce social orthodoxy upon any new visitors, so norms like "a site called hacker news should be about hacker news" cannot be enforced, and therefore disappear. Nor do the moderators seem to care to enforce the rules, so...
I would guess that in a year or so, the front page of news.ycombinator.com won't contain even one programming story most of the time. Paul Graham's essay says he thinks there's nothing wrong as of February 2009:
http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
so I suppose no official action is being taken or contemplated. Unfortunately, the character of a community is a lot easier and faster to destroy than one would think, and can never be restored, and so I suspect that by the time any action might be contemplated, it will already be too late.
Or perhaps a new site for just 'hacker news' without the rest ;)
Flagging only works if the moderators + pg agree it's off topic (Enough people flagged the Marriage article and it was killed, but then was apparently brought back to life anyway) :/
Appealing to the community to stop upvoting non hacker news and checking the [new] articles for more relevant articles seems like it may have more effect on keeping the magic alive here.
If the community decide they want to read the same sort of articles you find on the front page of Reddit/Digg etc, then so be it, but I personally think it'd be a shame. There's plenty of interesting hacker stories in the [new] section that aren't getting on the front page.