It's a shame that the internet devolved into cat pictures, pervasive advertisements, and political shouting matches. On the other hand, there are still some great communities out there for great discussion. I consider HN to be one of them.
It didn't devolve - it expanded. There is still plenty of great content out there, it's just mixed with a lot of other content of varying quality.
Maybe "diluted" is a fitting word.
Not really, "dilution" implies that when the Internet grows to include another crappy site everything else in the "solution" is slightly crappier. If a new web site for cat pictures or political shouting matches opens up tomorrow, it does not affect the quality and usefulness of HN.
No, but I've seen plenty of good subreddits go bad after a flood of new users!
Perhaps unintuitively, the Something Awful forums are another relatively small, intelligent community.
I genuinely worry about the day the SA forums get shut down for whatever reason. I've been posting there since 2003 and it's my first stop on the 'daily internet check' ritual.