Something to consider - if HN doesn't go dark it may become a refugee camp for a good chunk of bored reddit users (c. 70m daily pageviews), which could lead to a radical change in HN's userbase.
Good to support, too.
Good to support, too.
Either way, I don't think it's that big of a concern.
I know it's elitist, but I have no wish for this community to get exponentially larger.
My account is plenty old, and HN is most certainly seeing a lot more reddit-like posts. Honestly I think the downturn started about the time we lost the ability to see comment points in threads.
I think dropping the comment points was a reaction to the downturn.