What's your impression of signal vs. noise on HN over time?

As regular reader of /new with showdead=yes enabled in my profile (to see anything auto-flagged by algorithms) I estimate I upvote 1-2 submissions per page, a page is 30 entries I think. Some submissions are automated, some users submit every blog post of their company, there's some outright generic spam. I'm rarely unhappy what I see on the frontpage and https://news.ycombinator.com/best pretty much aligns with the kind of news and discussions I'm coming here for.

I would say that prior to the pandemic, the site was fairly strict about policing off topic, particularly political posts. Coinciding with the pandemic, I find that the technical focus of this site has been diluted.

As I recall, there was an external campaign to politicize this site and I guess to some extend it appears as that has been at least partially successful to me.

Been here since 2008. I think article quality is fine, but there's less expertise in the comments. I miss the really high quality comments from patio11 and tokenadult.

What's noise and what's signal depends on the reader. HN is a big tent. Lots of room for people with different priorities.

I think it is pretty good.

A few years back the gender activists were complaining about their posts being flagged. Today it is the right wing special snowflakes who complain that we don’t want to take their dog pills, anti-vax spam, and how wounded they are because somebody downvoted a comment. (E.g. we have to not just receive their spam but we have to affirm it.)

I am sure they feel more anguish than they cause us.

Way too many comments.