Like crcsmnky [1], I've been reading HN for a while now but have contributed little. The extant comments from domain adepts generally precludes my ability to add anything constructive to these discussions.

I too have noticed a shift in the timbre here lately. The degradation of civil and apropos discourse is marked. Criticism based on logic and rhetoric (ad hominem, straw-man, etcetera) has lost some ground to internet-acronyms (IANAL, IIRC, and such) Since culling sources takes work, this warrants addressing for risk of losing this relevance.

I've been thinking about this problem recently in the face of web searches that yield forum discussions. I'm begun to avoid forum results, due to endless threads that lack a solution to the specific problem (even sometimes incorrectly marked [Solved]).

Curated Q&A sites [2] address this successfully by putting the correct answer above the fold. But community discussions don't have a correct answer, so the problem here is not quite the same. I don't have a solution, but even revising sort order might do. I'd hazard to suggest an additional degree of community-based voting and editing should be added.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469618

[2] http://www.question2answer.org/

[edit] formatting