I come to HN for the comments. Every now and then I'll read something that really inspires me. I'm not necessarily talking about great advice, either. Sometimes just reading over other people's frustrations will lead me to new business ideas.
Being able to find the opinions of so many like minded individuals is both a blessing and a curse-- it's great to be able to skim the responses to major news items, but often I find myself just nodding along to every comment, even though the most thought provoking discussions are the ones where I end up disagreeing with the prevailing opinion.
I'm often disappointed by some of the front page submissions these days so I end up reading a few gems and for articles I'm not really into I'll go into the comments too. The comments can often be more interesting than the articles themselves. I'm right there with you!
> I'm often disappointed by some of the front page submissions these days
The supposed decline in submission quality is mostly an illusion. PG set up a page that only shows submissions by older users (first six months or first year --not sure which) to evaluate the supposed submission quality decline:
I don't think "old users" is a good metric for measuring quality, it assumes that the age of your account is somehow related to your intentions on this site.
There's 3 things I think are affecting the quality:
1) A lot of stuff is written specifically targeting HN, that probably didn't happen when the traffic a front page story got was negligible
2) There are sites that blindly submit everything they publish
3) There are people who blindly submit popular sites within seconds of them publishing anything
You don't have to be a new account to be doing any of those things. My account's ~4 years old, I could be doing any or all of them.
