It seems like I'm always on the tail-end of communities. Is this just simply a case of the grass is greener for you veterans of HN?
Communities seem to have a 2-5 year lead in cycle, followed by 1-3 years of good, healthy community. Then they get mainstream, bloated, and meta.
But they never really die, which is the saddest part. I can go to social networks I signed up for over a decade ago, and people are still stomping there.
And they are angry. Angry at being deserted, or angry because they put all their eggs into one basket, but either way you wind up with little hovels all over the Internet that are remnants of the gold rush for good discussion.
Some day, the Internet as a whole will find its El Dorado. One thing's for sure - it's probably not Facebook.
However, I've been on here for 3+ years. I've seen the community decline unfortunately. It's only been in the last year that I've seen more than 100 comments (although this probably a cognitive bias) consistently frontpage articles and in my opinion is a bad thing. The quantity has certainly increased, but technically the quality hasn't diminished, it's just much harder to dig through the crap to find it.
TL;DR - The signal to noise ratio has gotten much worse, but the signal quality seems to be the same.
Some new community is brewing somewhere as we speak, just participate wherever you still enjoy while you still enjoy it. And when you find a new community that you enjoy, simply participate ... in ten years, I guarantee that you'll make a comment exactly like this to some young gun ;)
Sadly HN is feeling more and more like it's in its twilight years, if only because of all these endless posts on how to "fix" it. Particularly since I'm seeing people suggest a $5 signup charge. That killed K5 stone dead.