[Evgeny]

If you think about it, "harder to consume quickly," as annoying as it is, is exactly what was needed to fix "the decline of HN."

I have to disagree. I used the comment scores exactly for this, to "consume quickly". Well, yes, there's only so much time I can spend on HN and being able to figure out which posts seem to be highly valued was helpful.

Most of the time I would read the discussion of the article before the article itself. Sometimes from the discusson I could see that the article would not interest me. Sometimes the discussion was so thorough that there would be no need to read the article at all.

Now I generally read the top comment and decide on that. It's good, because it saves even more time. It's bad, because I'm most likely missing on a lot of content.

Maybe eventually I'll get to the point when I open HN once in a few days for a few minutes and close again. That will save time, but a lot of interesting content will be missed.