1) Criticism is easy, solutions are hard. Rather than just complain, you ought to have at least started the discussion with a proposal of your own.
2) If you want to turn back the clock for HackerNews, you'd have to change the whole world. The complaints about "bro-grammers" and San Francisco being over run by startup douchebags are getting tired, but they're also true. Steve Jobs turned tech celebrities into today's rockstars, and the tenor of the average programming conversation in 2013 has deteriorated as a result. Every highschool slob in America who can solder a wire to a circuit board, or write a 4 line Python script, makes a self-important promo video impersonating Jonny Ive. GitHub is full of repos created by weekend programmers who make some pointless project that only appeals to other programmers and solves a problem that has been solved 1000 times since 1970. Tech has sex appeal now, and the world is awash with meatheads adopting the nerd aesthetic, and pretentious products created to crowdfund a quick buck. To "fix" hackernews, you would have address this change in global culture. Or you could just relax, deal with it, and skip over the links you dislike.
I would like to propose for HN open source project for developing a content curation system.
It's possible to infer and rank submitted link content automatically. This will help in removing completely irrelevant postings (e.g this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6942656 ).
Quora is doing something like this but it is targeted towards much wider audience. Whereas HN is focused on a special goal in mind so it can not be generalized for all kind of discussions.
There's very little you can do to reverse the tide. As the site grows in popularity, the initial focus gets diluted.
It's funny that you mention HN becoming a Reddit clone. When Reddit first began, the articles there were actually very much like HN, since the early adopters were techies. And as Reddit became more mainstream, HN was created for just the techie subgroup (this was before subreddits were possible).
And now the cycle is happening again, where HN is becoming more mainstream. For me, the solution is to discover other communities that have the tighter focus I'm looking for. Personally, I'm interested in SaaS. So the forums at discuss.bootstrapped.fm have been very useful to me.
So my suggestion is to find other communities that are important to you, and spend some time there as well. In the similar fashion that many migrated from Reddit to HN.
As a recent member(11 months), I can clearly see that shift in the kind of articles that gets posted(or upvoted to the top) on HN over the last few months. A bit too much NSA, Snowden and Bitcoin these days. Not sure what the right word for it is but "tech activism" ? Not necessarily bad but usually not something I visit HN for. The telegram thing..that is more like it
As long as we manage to keep the Doge (and other) memes off HN, we're still far better.
edit: Maybe we should kill off all those Bitcoin/Dogecoin/xcoin submissions, at least those in the line of "value of xcoin up/down y%". The xcoin flood really goes on my nerves.
Hacker news is changing. It was bound to happen as it became more popular and global. Increased popularity has resulted in poor quality content submission and discussion.
Most of the time I am seeing content submitted and discussed which does not comply HN submission requirement.
"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"
I don't think that quote is relevant anymore. pg wrote that in 2009, and both HN and reddit have changed a lot over the past five years. If you asked him what he thinks about that topic today I'm sure he would say something different.
The fact that these stories get submitted and discussed would appear to suggest that they gratify other people's intellectual curiosity, just not your own. Perhaps you should submit more of the kind of content you want read?
I think what you're really looking for is a content filter.
There potentially exists a solution: leave the front page as it is, and create a secondary page where stories are weighted by taking into consideration something like upvoters' seniority on HN.
One upvote by a 3-year old account weighs 3 orders of magnitude as much as one upvote by a 1-year old account.
It's not a perfect solution, but it has the potential to make everyone happy.
I don't think this holds true anymore. I would argue that many of the articles have become more popularised. It is undeniable that HN has changed over the years. I'm not saying it is like Reddit, but there are certainly parallels with the way Reddit evolved.
2) If you want to turn back the clock for HackerNews, you'd have to change the whole world. The complaints about "bro-grammers" and San Francisco being over run by startup douchebags are getting tired, but they're also true. Steve Jobs turned tech celebrities into today's rockstars, and the tenor of the average programming conversation in 2013 has deteriorated as a result. Every highschool slob in America who can solder a wire to a circuit board, or write a 4 line Python script, makes a self-important promo video impersonating Jonny Ive. GitHub is full of repos created by weekend programmers who make some pointless project that only appeals to other programmers and solves a problem that has been solved 1000 times since 1970. Tech has sex appeal now, and the world is awash with meatheads adopting the nerd aesthetic, and pretentious products created to crowdfund a quick buck. To "fix" hackernews, you would have address this change in global culture. Or you could just relax, deal with it, and skip over the links you dislike.