[Rochus]

From my point of view, the quality of discussions is generally getting worse, including here (you could, for example, make a statistic of how many comments start with "I" and do not refer to the referenced article at all). It likely also depends which subreddit you're in; e.g. r/ProgrammingLanguages has generally good contributions and discussions, r/programming not so. Concerning the UX: I'm using https://old.reddit.com/ which is OK and remains constant.

[barrysteve]

The topic raised by a new speaker doesn't always grab everyone's attention though. It happens in group conversations too.

I'm amazed HN can still find some periphirally related topic to talk about and save an otherwise dead thread.

The statistic of 'missed topics' would be really interesting if you could parse what people were really wanting to talk about.

[Rochus]

Very often people seem to just pick up the title and to tell the world how they relate to some key words without even having a look at the article. Since a couple of weeks I regularly check the HN RSS feed to see what was posted; I would consider myself part of the original target audience of HN but find more interesting stuff in the RSS feed than on the front page; from that I conclude that the audience has changed.

[barrysteve]

You're right. A lot of articles are paywalled, extermely padded advertising vehicles which people come to the comments to avoid. The audience might be reacting accordingly.

The better and more readable articles linked on HN could demonstrate this phenomena, if the audience shows better comments underneath them. I haven't looked for the correlation before.

[Rochus]

The interesting articles which I find in the RSS feed but not on the frontpage nor elsewhere on HN are neither paywalled nor padded with advertisments; either they got lost in the flood of irrelevant articles or did not receive points for other reasons; the one point I can award does little to change that.