This is what happened on /. too, and why I eventually left for here. A larger and larger percentage of stories were clickbait, or designed to provoke heated discussion. Vim now better than emacs! Climate change may be responsible for hosting center failures. Go has features no other languages have! It promoted fun conversations sometimes even enlightening ones, but then they just started repeating them and I realized I wasn't learning things anymore.
I like Ruby, Javascript, and lifestyle posts. The next guy likes x language and y technology and lifestyle posts. I ignore his tech posts and he ignores my tech posts but we meet in the middle through lifestyle posts. The larger t he community grows the more engagement each post gets but the most engagement goes to lifestyle posts. Since posts rise due to how much engagement they get, you are destined to see more and more lifestyle content dominate the front page as the community grows larger.
There is a subset of every community that hates something and you seem to hate lifestyle posts but most of the community appears not too making this trend inevitable unless moderation decides to change the rules.
Now that you put it that way, lifestyle posts weren't an issue on /. because you could filter on topics labeled by moderators that were meta moderated. I actually like lifestyle posts, but I don't want this site to be nothing else. That would be like the grocery store only carrying GPUs. I like them just fine but I'll still need to find a new place to get food.
And the problem I was pointing out with /. wasn't lifestyle posts, it was intentional controversy for the sake of it.
