I think HN's saving grace is its limited feature set and design.

I build a UI layer on top of the HN API to attract a more general audience. But it's only a "reader", you can't sign in and start posting. I'd be happy to keep it that way.

My suspicion is that the current interface design and feature set of HN only attracts a certain kind of audience. The moment that changes, I think then we'll start to see a decrease in quality, which to me is the death bell of a social network. On the flip-side, if HN doesn't adapt, will it eventually observe a decrease in traffic as the visual appeal fails to land on newer generations of people?

These days, whenever I visit a Reddit post with a decent question being asked, and see the first handful of comments are joke responses with upvotes and badges, I just leave.