In regards to the opinions about the quality of HN
Do you know what the one thing that running this IRC server has taught me over the past 12 years? The people and the purpose behind the server change over time. Initially, the server was full of 14 year old kids, my e-friends from all over the globe, hacking Diablo and Warcraft. I had friends on there that I never thought would leave. Over the period of 12 years things happen, though. Some of them got married. Some got jobs that demanded all of their time. One went to jail because he hacked a library's computer system and then thought it'd be wise to tell them about it (he's out now, though). Some lost interest in IRC in general. Some lost interest because the others had left. Essentially, people grew up or just changed in general - real life happened. While all of these people were leaving though, we never had a lack of new people showing up. I think, out of the 45 people in the channel only 5 may be from the original group of people. That's about 40 new people that have no clue that we used to hack Diablo and Warcraft. That's 40 new people that don't know about all of the Sprint phone conference call number codes we hacked back in 2001 and then used every night of the week for several months. My parents never could figure out why I'd be up at 4am on a school night laughing my ass off on the phone. That's 40 new people that don't remember any of the inside jokes or awesome times that were had on that IRC server years before. Do I know these 40 new people now? Of course. They enjoy using the IRC server now just as we did back in 1999. They still discuss technical things, but those technical things have evolved into their interests because they're the majority now. The channel has taken on their sense of humor.
The point is, the server is still used for letting these people escape whatever it is they're trying to escape by being there - work, school, home, whatever. That's the same reason we all used it back in 1999, also. I've thought about shutting it down many times. That wouldn't be right, though. These guys are attached to it, as am I. We'd all probably cry if it were shut down.
I'm new to HN, relatively. Only about 150 days on this registered account. Probably about 200 days since I discovered the site. Do you know who introduced me to this site? My completely non-technical friend who wouldn't quit quoting Paul Graham while him and I were trying to bootstrap out first startup. He found YC and HN via Digg. I thought I knew everything at that point in time. I thought Apache, MySQL and Django meant I was a god. I would laugh when he'd quote somebody's essay about how a startup should be done. Not until after that startup fizzled out did I really begin to look into what was "bleeding edge" on the web scene. (I've always been more of a debugger and reverse engineering guy. I still have a hard time calling web developers Hackers :P) Somehow, researching async python lead me to HN. If PG could show you all my visitor stats since then, you'd probably see that I view the site 100+ times a day, now. I'm even a failed applicant of YC. I consider myself a member here. I love this site. I've gone from level 1 web dev guy to like level 10 just by reading it. It's not even that I learned stuff from here, because I've always been a self researcher anyways, but it's more than my thought process and mindset have changed. My complete approach to web dev has shifted. I went from being the guy who'd use "if only I had an idea" as an excuse every day to a guy who has coded up probably 50 different MVPs in the past 200 days. There is still quality in HN. HN is still changing people's professional futures whether or not a user with 50k karma caused it or not. I don't even care about those small, useless details - I can scan this site for the content that I care about on my own.
And that brings me to my main wrapping up point here ... this is an online community like any other. HN is not immune to the same fate of every online community - they'll all decline in traffic or quality at some point. We're not going to somehow avoid a slight shift in majority opinion. I don't think HN is there yet, though. Just like I've done with my IRC server - as readers here for a common purpose, we have to be able to extract the info useful to us and not bitch about the info that we think is irrelevant. God knows my use-case for this site is way different than patio11's, I'm sure. I hardly even fully know about patio11's reputation - only that he has a very good one. That's the beauty of this whole thing though - I still managed to find the good and useful info on HN, which has to be a testament to the quality of the community in general.