I know roughly a dozen people who frequent HN. Some of them are friends, some of them are family, some of them are coworkers. Some are involved in network security, some are programmers, some are involved in web design, and some are merely interested in tech news. Some are them male, some of them are female.
Yet, without exception, they have all expressed to me that they think that the site has substantially lowered in quality since the details of PRISM were leaked.
I think the fundamental problem is that that story brought in a large influx of new members at once. This disrupts the 'integration' process that most older members of this site went through when they first joined. Any post that was trite or lacked in quality was quickly downvoted, and it become apparent very quickly that this is a site that encourages thoughtful, mature, calm comments. On the other hand, during an influx of new users, this process is disrupted. The new users, especially if they share a similar ideology, will upvote each other if they agree with the idea of the post, even if it lacks in quality or is counter-productive to intelligent discourse. They will then look around the site, and see that similar comments are upvoted across the board, and think that this is acceptable behaviour.
There is a lot of anger at these new users, but I do not feel it is their fault, as they are acting as they would on any other forum, and they simply do not understand that they are hurting the site. I think it is our duty, as older members of this website, to fix this problem.
So, what is the solution? Well, I think that it is clear at this point that sitting back and hoping that the situation will resolve itself is not going to work. I think that there needs to be a concerted effort between the mods and the users with high karma to discipline new users who do not following proper posting etiquette. I think that more voting 'power' should be given to the older users with higher karma. Giving trusted members of this website more voting power will allow their votes to outweigh the large number of new members, and will allow the trusted members to teach new users what types of posts are acceptable and which types of posts are not. One of the problems that arises is that users will create uncivil posts that are clearly very partisan in nature, but that will be propped up by people who agree with them. This is poisonous for the environment of this site and clearly does not encourage useful discourse. These posts need to be ruthlessly downvoted, and it must be made very apparent to new users that they must be civil, regardless of how many people agree with them.
This will allow for a closer adherence to the rules, in particular, "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon". I want to hear every new detail about PRISM because it is clearly a very, very important topic for the tech industry. However, the vast majority of the recent posts about Snowden or the NSA or PRISM are completely lacking in any original content, and are merely repeating the same ideas over and over again, diluting the content of this site.