Let's see how (or if) Quora or HN follow that path.
Long gone are the days of waking up to a front page full of Erlang posts in an attempt to scare off the general public whenever there was press about HN. I think it's been accepted that HN is more just general interest about startups these days.
That's not to say I don't enjoy HN, it's great, but I certainly could use less of the "Show HN" startup announcements on the front page or techcrunch articles that are about nothing.
As long as we're taking random samples, let's see what, say, November 2010 looked like:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101119073443/http://news.ycomb...
How about March 2008? (I'm picking these arbitrarily...)
https://web.archive.org/web/20080327223917/http://news.ycomb...
If either of those front pages showed up today, people would be complaining very loudly about HN's steep decline.
I still find both of those archive grabs more interesting. They're certainly not all posts just for the neckbeards, that's not what ever drew me to HN, but they don't lean so heavy towards "Show HN: Please look at my startup".
My feed now looks like this:
What should a 22 year old do with $3000
What should a 23 year old do with $2000
What should a 25 year old do with $5000
on and on and on.
A few years ago, it would have been "How can/should spending and saving evolve over a person's life?"
I know that's a specific and perhaps pedantic example, but there's been a definite shift in the vibe on Quora, from a place where users hoped to contribute insight, to a place where users feel entitled to receive it.