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.