This is not a new phenomenon. When I first found HN, I conducted an experiment: Along with ordinary attempt-to-contribute comments, I made a couple of content-free remarks whose only attractiveness was the shared premise that "startups are awesome". They immediately received nearly an order of magnitude more upvotes than anything else I had written.
I just checked, and my last comment was 906 days ago. This phenomenon is not new, and any reaction predicated on the idea that this is a relatively recent, relatively sudden decline are unlikely to succeed. It's a structural problem, possibly with human nature, and the best we can do is slow it down (at which HN has been successful, but that's probably only because it's not a business, and so explicitly does not share other sites' preoccupation with growth).
It's definitely business - back around the time Gawker got banned from YC for being trashy, there was some amount of opinion that TechCrunch stories should get the boot too - but it was never going to happen because of the exposure TechCrunch gives YC startups.
PG is not going to do anything that increases the quality of news.YC if it in any way could negatively impact YC's bottom line.
That was all it took to convince me that Giles Bowkett's original critique of HN was entirely correct, when he said several years ago that this transformation was inevitable: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...
I just checked, and my last comment was 906 days ago. This phenomenon is not new, and any reaction predicated on the idea that this is a relatively recent, relatively sudden decline are unlikely to succeed. It's a structural problem, possibly with human nature, and the best we can do is slow it down (at which HN has been successful, but that's probably only because it's not a business, and so explicitly does not share other sites' preoccupation with growth).