[gruseom]

they seem to have roughly the same subjects over the long term as they did in the beginning

That's been my impression for a long time. Do your techniques allow you to measure the trend of people complaining about the site deteriorating? Because that's been going on for a long time too, and in approximately the same way (though possibly in cycles).

I think that has to do with an influx of programmers / people interested in technology in general whereas originally most of the people on news.yc were active in the startup scene.

Pretty clearly that is because the site was originally named Startup News and had a relatively narrow scope, then was renamed to Hacker News as part of explicitly broadening the scope.

[jacquesm]

> Do your techniques allow you to measure the trend of people complaining about the site deteriorating?

No, especially not because plenty of those get flagged and die.