It's always been like this.
Like any social news site, you can never get content that perfectly suits what you want. When you start looking for content you think doesn't suit your tastes, you will find always find it.
Nothing has changed.
Vote up posts you think suit HN and ignore ones you don't.
If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying
that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
This time, it's true. In the last three or four months the quality of HN has dropped dramatically. I think some point soon, sadly, we can call it: HN has jumped the shark.
Nonetheless, flagged.
I haven't found anything really comparable to HN. IMO, the quality of submissions and comments has gone downhill. It's a common problem of fast growth in a forum: Too many newbies show up, outnumbering the old members. The newbies don't learn the old culture/mannerisms/whatever. Bam, endless September.
The Internet couldn't have supported Wikipedia before the Endless September.
I know it would be a lot of work, but it would be nice to have a "filter all comments and submissions by people who joined after time X" feature. Or at least let me ignore specific users. Oh, and anything I flag should never again be seen by me.
That's a bit much I think, very elitist.
Consider: editors sleep. I've noticed a tendency for less-topical stuff to appear on the front page on weekends and at, say, 9am UTC, when the entire USA is asleep, and when it is 2am in Silicon Valley. From this I conclude that a sizable fraction of hardcore HN vets, including the team with Super Moderator Powers, lives and works in the USA, particularly in CA. This, of course, is no surprise at all.
So, try reading HN at the better times. Or, recruit more English-speaking, tasteful HN readers in Central Asia, India, China, Australia.
Or you might just try to laugh off the occasional stupid story.
Or, launch your own. An HN rival launches every week. Sometimes one even grows large enough to be noticed.
If there are startup stories, articles or discussions that are worth reading, they'll hit the front page in HN.
That being said, HN is community for self-improvement. The story "How money restricts life's pleasures" has no relation to hacking/finance/startup but can be life changing and may be even change the track of your startup.
You are your startup. Improve yourself and your startup will also improve.
For me it's not about getting the Apple news from HN, but following the (high level) discussions about them.
It would keep the trolls out and select for those users who truly value the community.