I fully agree. Yet the OP and others like it keep getting upvoted (it's currently #1 on HN) some some people agree with the fact that HN is sliding. When I look at comments of that sort I see that they are generally based on "I feel", "it seems", etc. There must be tons of people on HN working on text analysis, twitter sentiment analysis and related, why doesn't someone come up with an analysis to back up that claim or to refute it. Then, at least, we would have something concrete to discuss like the methodology of the experiment and the HN data used.