[bigmealbigmeal]

I wonder if the reason this community embraced innovation in the early days is because only those who embrace new things are going to be attracted to a site in its early days. In other words, even the act of using Hacker News was an embracement of the new, which filtered out anyone who didn't embrace the new -- so you were only going to find people embracing the new in the comments.

Now that the site is established, it moreso attracts people who are interested in the established, and less-so attracts people who are interested in new things. This problem tends to amplify itself, as a community that rejects new things is also going to drive away people who are interested in new things.

Now that Hacker News is established, it's just not "it" anymore. "It" is somewhere else.

But this is all just a theory. The counter to this argument is that many people on Hacker News in 2007 expressed serious reservations to Dropbox/cloud storage when it was first revealed -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863. So perhaps what we're seeing is that problem-solvers (developers) also tend to be problem-finders.