Have HN comments gone downhill?
Well dang, who can resist weighing in on that one? :)
The problem is that a crowd of 100K is just a different animal than a crowd of 5 or 10k. I noticed sometime in the first few years that I couldn't say much of anything without somebody misunderstanding me -- or getting offended. So then I spent a lot of wasted time either 1) writing comments the size of the Titanic, or 2) responding 43 levels down to help define what the definition of "is" is.
One of the things I used to like about the old HN was that it was startup focused, but open-minded. We'd post all kinds of stuff, but at the end of the day the conversation all came back to "And what could we do right now to help fix that?"
Now the conversations just spin off along traditional lines, the same as you'd see anywhere else on the net. (Admittedly, the mods make it much nicer than most places)
This relates directly to the "Friends" story now on the front page. I'd rather belong to a smaller, more focused group, one that shared my interests (but not my opinions, problem-solving methods, or worldviews) I find this is both better for me and for the discussion as a whole.