[dang]

HN has always been rather intensively curated. You may be right about the statistical trend, but conscious intervention can perhaps reverse "entropy" somewhat. The question is how to do this better.

Fascinatingly, the number of stories posted to the site has not been increasing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446750

That might be good. The number of substantive HN-appropriate stories in the world is not growing by leaps and bounds; neither, therefore, should our story stream. We want quality, not quantity.

There's a lot we can do about story quality, because the front page is so limited, there are many fewer stories than comments, and because we manage the front page for quality in ways we could never manage the threads. However, there's no way we can scan the universe of stories to find all the best ones. We rely on /newest to be our universe of stories. If /newest is broken, we'll fix it. But we're going to focus on the problem of bad comments first.

[kevando]

I'm happy to see these are the priorities. To emphasize comments > submissions, my HN app for android opens all articles directly to the comments. it takes 2 clicks to see the submitted link.